Senior Software Engineer - AI Product Builder

At Instructure, we believe in the power of people to grow and succeed throughout their lives. Our goal is to amplify that power by creating intuitive products that simplify learning and personal development, facilitate meaningful relationships, and inspire people to go further in their education and careers.

New Markets is a standalone division inside Instructure, built to generate new revenue with AI-built products. As the Builder in a two-person pod, you’re the other half of a small company: the Founder owns the bet, and you own whether what gets built actually holds up. In an era where AI generates most of the code, you’re the person who makes sure it’s right—fast enough for a pilot, sound enough to scale. You’ll build hands-on every day with a token budget, partner closely with a non-technical Pod Founder, and rely on a shared platform and operating team so you stay focused on the product. The pace is fast and transparent, and we measure ourselves on revenue, not activity.

What you will do

• Own the architectural integrity of the product. If it ships, you stand behind it.

• Take responsibility for code quality, security, and scalability across agentically generated code, leveraging the shared harness so you’re not rebuilding plumbing.

• Build hands-on in Git with AI development tooling, moving at pilot pace early and hardening the product as it heads toward general availability.

• Direct and verify far more code than you hand-write, and catch what matters before it ships.

• Decide what’s safe to ship now and what genuinely needs a closer look, and own that judgment.

• Write context back to the shared system so the Founder and the operating team work off the same surface, not guesswork.

• Partner closely with a non-technical Founder, translating between product intent and what the system can actually do.

What you’ll need to know/have

• Proven experience shipping production software and owning its reliability and security in the real world.

• Senior engineering judgment: you direct and verify AI output at high volume rather than authoring every line.

• Fluency, or fast-developing fluency, with AI-assisted development.

• Comfort owning security and scale yourself, without a platform team as a backstop.

• A product mindset—you care that the thing works for the customer, not just that it compiles.

• The instinct to move at pilot pace without shipping something that falls over the day it scales.