Software QA Engineer at Instrumental in Palo Alto, CA

Manufacturing advanced electronics requires understanding millions of signals generated across complex assembly processes. Instrumental builds systems that capture and analyze those signals — images, test results, and process data — enabling engineers to discover failures, identify root causes, and deploy production controls that improve yield and product maturity. Leading companies such as NVIDIA, Cisco, and Meta rely on Instrumental to accelerate new product development and scale manufacturing across global factories. Instrumental has become mission-critical for manufacturers building and scaling the next generation of AI infrastructure hardware.

We’re seeking a Quality Engineer to join our team and help scale our ability to deliver world-class manufacturing AI solutions. The testing domain spans hardware, our edge computing stack, and our customer-facing web application. The ideal candidate will have experience testing hardware and end-to-end UX testing in software.

Come join us if you are meticulous and passionate about improving electronics manufacturing and love working with a global team. The ideal candidate is a go getter, multi-faceted, technically savvy, organized, and deeply customer-oriented.

What’s Great About This Role:

• Make an impact: You’ll work in a fast-paced, iterative environment where you are empowered and expected to participate in fulfilling our company mission to eliminate half of the inefficiencies in manufacturing—a $12T problem.
• Broad technical scope: As a QA engineer, you’ll be exposed to the full gamut of our cloud platform, ML/AI pipelines, edge platform including hardware and embedded systems, SaaS, and edge applications.
• Guardians of quality end-to-end: At Instrumental, we believe that the best products are built cross-functionally. You are a guardian of the quality of our solution end-to-end, so that our customers love it, our field deployment engineers love it, our product owners and engineers are proud of it.
• Influence how we build: As a member of our small QA team, you’ll directly influence our approach and systems towards quality. Your work is highly visible!

We’re looking for someone who has:

• Demonstrated ability to operate at startup scale; ready to tackle evolving challenges that require incremental and fast-paced innovation
• Proven experience writing and executing test cases that strongly align with customer values and the priorities of the project and business
• Minimum 3+ years of QA experience with web and/or mobile applications; bonus if you have experience testing hardware
• Cares deeply about the end-to-end user experience and has demonstrated in a prior role that they will flag issues even when they’re “to spec”
• Demonstrated experience working in a highly cross-functional environment + brings a strong voice in product, UX, and engineering review sessions to ensure quality considerations throughout the stages of development.
• Strong communication skills and an ability to explain nuanced technical topics to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience working on cloud platforms and SaaS development lifecycles
• Past experience working with data-driven applications including basic SQL and/or scripting capabilities (SQL, shell, Python, etc.)
• Experience owning test automation and driving unit/integration/solution test automation coverage with development engineers.
• Past experience testing data analysis and visualization software, with proficiency in writing statistical calculations

We’re a growing team that works collaboratively, is supportive of each other, and is highly energized by the opportunity for large impact. We actively work to promote an inclusive environment, valuing passion and the ability to learn. You’re encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn’t precisely match the job description!

The following is a representative annual base salary range for this position within the Bay Area: $139,000 - $177,000. In addition, job level & salary opportunity is evaluated through our interview process – we review experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of each applicant.

Instrumental is very proud to offer a highly-rated variety of benefits including: Health, Vision, Dental, Public Transit/Commuter Plans, and Parental Leave.

At Instrumental, protecting company and customer information is a shared responsibility. Employees are expected to comply with company engineering, security, access control, and privacy policies, and promptly report suspected security incidents or policy violations.