Platform Engineer

About Instead

Instead is where tax work gets done. Our AI agent orchestrates the entirety of how work gets done in tax, from preparation and compliance to filing and advisory. It's a fundamentally new way of doing tax work, and it's why top 500 firms, Big Four teams, and enterprise corporate tax departments are choosing Instead.

What makes us unique: we hold full government approvals with the IRS, 48 states, and all cities to e-file 1040, 1041, 1120, 1120S, and 1065, with 706, 709, 990, 5500, 2290, and PPT coming for tax year 2026. Instead is a full replacement for CCH Axcess, GoSystem, UltraTax, OneSource, CorpTax, Lacerte, ProConnect, Drake, and more. No other tax startup will be able to offer these capabilities for years as we are two to three years ahead of everyone else in government approvals. This lets us build product experiences that are simply unmatched in the market.

Instead is backed by Conviction, IRIS (the largest tax software provider in the UK), Skylark, Aprio, and many of our partners and customers. Our team includes leaders from Intuit, Gusto, Zenefits, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer, PwC, BDO, RSM, and KPMG.

The Role

We're looking for a Platform Engineer to own the infrastructure and developer tooling that powers Instead. You'll build and maintain the systems that let our engineering team ship fast and our product run reliably at scale. This includes CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, deployment automation, monitoring, and the internal tools that make our engineers more productive every day.

This is a high-autonomy role. You'll be the first dedicated platform hire, working closely with our engineering leadership to define how we build, deploy, and operate our production systems. If you care about developer experience, infrastructure reliability, and making complex systems simple, this is the place to do it.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and maintain CI/CD pipelines that let engineers go from code to production safely and quickly


• Own cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP) including provisioning, scaling, cost optimization, and security hardening


• Build and improve monitoring, alerting, and observability across the stack so the team knows what's happening in production before customers do


• Develop internal tooling and automation that removes friction from the development workflow


• Implement infrastructure-as-code practices using Terraform, Pulumi, or similar tools


• Manage deployment strategies including blue-green deployments, canary releases, and rollback procedures


• Partner with engineering teams to define and enforce standards for reliability, performance, and security


• Support incident response and post-mortem processes to continuously improve system resilience


• Evaluate and integrate third-party tools and services that accelerate the team without adding unnecessary complexity

What You Bring

• 5+ years of experience in platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure roles


• Deep experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker)


• Strong background in CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins, or similar)


• Proficiency in infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation)


• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Datadog, Grafana, PagerDuty, or similar)


• Solid scripting and automation skills (Python, Bash, Go)


• You've operated production systems at scale and understand what it takes to keep them running

What Makes Someone Exceptional

• You've been the first or early platform/infra hire at a fast-growing company and know what it means to build the foundation everyone else depends on


• You think about developer experience as a product. Every pipeline you build, every tool you configure, you ask "how does this make the engineer's day better?"


• You can balance speed with reliability. You know when to move fast and when to slow down and get the architecture right


• You treat infrastructure as code, documentation as a feature, and alerts as an opportunity to improve the system


• You care about cost. You know how to run a lean cloud bill without sacrificing performance

Compensation

$200,000 base + equity

Location

San Francisco (on-site)

Instead is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate candidates based on capability, judgment, ownership, and fit for the role's responsibilities. We welcome candidates who can help us build a category-defining company in tax technology.