Senior Full-Stack Engineer

Meet Instinct 👋

Instinct Science is the AI leader in veterinary medicine - and we're just getting started. Our platform is already transforming how veterinary teams practice, combining a cloud-native EMR with real-time clinical decision support and applied AI that saves animal lives every single day. We didn't enter this space to make incremental improvements. We're here to disrupt a massive, underserved industry from the ground up - and we're looking for the engineers who want to help us define what comes next.

This is a rare kind of opportunity: a proven product with real traction, a category-leading position, and the next big inflection point right in front of us. Engineers here don't wait for specs - they own problems end-to-end, architect systems that scale, and ship intelligent products that directly impact healthcare outcomes. If you want to build at the intersection of AI and SaaS, move fast, and do work that actually matters, Instinct is where you should be.

At Instinct Science, we believe in leading with compassion. Our team, our customers, and their patients and clients are the foundation of everything we do. Our culture is guided by our U.C.A.R.E. values, which serve as our daily compass: 

• Urgency: We move with speed because our mission is too important to wait. Urgency means prioritizing high-impact work, making timely decisions, and being highly responsive to our customers, partners, and fellow employees.
• Customer First: We’re our customers’ (and this profession’s) biggest fans. We put them first and obsess over helping them solve their challenges.
• Act with Grace, Not Teeth: We treat people with kindness, humor, humility, and assume good intent. We ask what we would want if we were in the other person’s shoes.
• Right Things, Right Reasons: We take ownership of all tasks, big and small. When we make mistakes, we own them, fix them quickly, and learn.
• Excellence is in our DNA: We hold ourselves and each other to high standards because our work is too important to do otherwise.

If these values speak to you, you might be a good fit for our Senior Full-Stack Engineer job. 

A Sneak Peek of Your Role 🔭

This job, and the team at Instinct, is remote.

As a Sr. Full-Stack Engineer, you will play a key role in designing and developing modern veterinary software that serves thousands of users in animal hospitals across the globe. Engineers in this role often take ownership of projects and have the ability to take on larger and more complex features and bugs. You will work closely with a small, cross-functional, highly-collaborative team to deliver quality software that solves real problems for our customers. Our teams have a deep understanding of their domains and work to deliver value with minimal overhead. We prize excellence, creativity, and accountability and in return provide autonomy and an environment to do your best work.

Why Join Instinct Now?
We're at an inflection point. We've proven product-market fit, and we're scaling fast. The next 18 months will define whether we become the platform every vet clinic uses or just another tool in the drawer.

If you join now, you'll:

• Shape core product decisions while we're still small enough to pivot quickly
• Work on greenfield projects that will serve tens of thousands of users
• Help build the engineering culture and practices for a team that will 10x

What You’ll Do 🐱‍💻

• You'll own features end-to-end - from talking to veterinarians about their biggest frustrations, to prototyping solutions, to shipping production code that thousands of users rely on daily. This means:
  • Driving product direction: Partner with customers and product managers to identify high-impact problems, not just implement specs
  • Building with Elixir & React: Design scalable, elegant solutions using functional programming principles we love
  • Embracing ambiguity: Turn vague customer pain points into concrete features through experimentation and iteration
  • Moving fast: Ship meaningful updates weekly, gather feedback, and iterate
  • Mentoring & leading: Define technical direction, elevate junior engineers, and establish patterns that scale with our growth
  • Owning outcomes: You're measured by customer impact, not story points completed

Who You Are 🐱‍💻

• You might thrive here if:
  • You've felt frustrated building features nobody uses—you want to validate before you build
  • You love functional programming elegance and think tools like Elixir make you a better engineer
  • You get energized by talking to users and seeing your code solve their real problems
  • You default to shipping small and iterating over perfecting in isolation
  • Ambiguity excites you more than it stresses you out

• Must Haves:
  • 5+ years of experience building modern SaaS applications
  • Knowledge of both back-end and front-end development languages
  • Ability to break complex problems into actionable and efficient work
  • Team-first attitude, including a strong desire to mentor teammates and build effective, lightweight work patterns
  • Strong communication skills in a remote work environment
  • Commitment to quality driven by empathy for our customers and their patients
  • Detail-oriented and organized in your work
• Nice-to-Haves:
  • Deep knowledge of Elixir or Erlang for back-end development
  • Knowledge of Typescript and React for front-end development
  • Experience using AWS to build, deploy and troubleshoot applications
  • Proven experience with relational databases, including using good design patterns and building and tuning efficient queries/data access

How Instinct will Care about YOU 🌞

• We offer a supportive and caring work environment.
• We are transparent, open, honest, and empathic, both internally and externally.
• We pay our team well. 
• We offer medical, dental and vision benefits and 401K with match.
• We give our team owner-like flexibility over work and time-off, including time to innovate and Flow State Fridays.
• We offer a generous stipend for wellness, professional development, and collaboration that can be used for you and your pet(s)!
• We provide all-expense-paid time throughout the year together, including at our annual retreat.

Base Compensation range for this role, depending on the level you are hired in at is $150,000 - $175,000

Instinct is an equal opportunity employer committed to equality and providing a pleasant work environment free from harassment or discrimination in any form. All employees will be treated equally without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, ancestry, veteran, or disability status.

If you require accommodations throughout any part of the pre-employment process, please contact our People team at peopleteam@instinct.vet