Software Engineer (Bangalore)

About the role

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, and 2290 coming for tax year 2026. No one else can offer this, and no one else will for years as it takes that long to pass 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, and many of our partners and customers. Our team includes leaders from Intuit, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer, Gusto, PwC, BDO, RSM, and KPMG.

The national publication Accounting Today, twice recognized me as one of the “Top 100 Most Influential People in the Accounting Profession - Ones To Watch”.

About the role

In this role, you will get the chance to build innovative AI-powered tax software alongside a dynamic team. You'll work on both our customer-facing product Instead (instead.com) and our backend internal tooling that empowers our teams to build cutting-edge features. This role is at the forefront of leveraging AI to drive innovation across our platform, working on exciting high-value features for our customers. If you're passionate about working on real production use cases utilizing LLMs and want to contribute to groundbreaking AI applications in a fast-paced environment, you'll thrive as you help us drive innovation in tax technology.

Here is the tech you will get the chance to utilize:

- Front End: Vue, Nuxt, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS

- Back End: Go, Docker on AWS ECS/Fargate, PostgreSQL on AWS RDS

- AI: Cursor with Sonnet 3.5, Langchain, Helicone, Gemini, OpenAI's API utilizing 4o (still exploring best use cases for o1 pro) and any other piece of AI tech that we can get our hands on

What you'll do

- Ship full-stack product features end to end for our live customer platform

- Make key product improvements based on customer feedback and usage analytics

- Understand and solve critical product bugs across the full stack

- Build and integrate components for infrastructure, supporting production-level inference and advanced prompt engineering

- Create tools and internal platforms to enhance the productivity and capabilities of Instead's teams

- Additional projects as needed by the internal engineering team and US-based product teams

What you'll need

- Proficiency in full-stack development, with a strong understanding of web frameworks, backend systems, and cloud infrastructure