Articles by Stephen
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Full Stack Staff Engineer
Full Stack Staff Engineer
About the role You'll work closely with the CTO and VP of Product to develop the technical strategy and deliver…
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Stephen Ripley reposted thisStephen Ripley reposted this🌍 We’re hiring a Lead / Senior Product Manager! At Instrumental, we’re on a mission to eliminate the 20 cents of every manufacturing dollar that’s wasted in mistakes, experiments, downtime, and scrap. Our customers include some of the most innovative companies in the world — Meta, NVIDIA, Bose, and more — and we’re growing fast, especially in the AI-Infrastructure and Compute space. To accelerate our journey, we’re looking for a Product Manager who thrives at the intersection of hardware and software. This is not a “sit back and write specs” role. You’ll: - Get your hands dirty in factories and with customers. - Translate deep insights into impactful product outcomes. - Drive iteration speed that sets a new standard for the industry. - Play a pivotal role in shaping a platform that’s transforming how products are built. We’re excited about candidates who have direct hardware manufacturing/NPI experience and have since moved into software product management. You’ll bring both worlds together to build tools that empower engineers and factories to solve problems in real-time. If you’re energized by impact, speed, and working on the frontier of AI + manufacturing, we’d love to talk. 📍 Palo Alto, CA | Hybrid | Full-time 💡 See full description in the comments.
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Stephen Ripley shared thisWe're hiring an ML Engineer who wants their models to actually matter. Manufacturing is ML's highest-stakes playground. While the world builds chatbots, at Instrumental your work deploys directly to manufacturing lines processing millions of parts monthly. You own the full pipeline—data ingestion from high-speed cameras, feature engineering, model training, and production deployment. You build it, you ship it, you monitor it. Your models catch defects that could otherwise ship to customers. We work with Fortune 500 manufacturers where latency and precision directly impact production throughput. Your algorithms run on edge devices in factories, not solely in the cloud. Performance, memory, and hardware utilization are core constraints that make the engineering interesting and the impact real.Stephen Ripley shared thisWe're Hiring an ML Engineer at Instrumental! 🌟 Hardware development is like coding without a debugger—tough, right? Instrumental uses AI to help teams at Meta, Bose, and Cisco catch issues early, build faster, and reduce waste. We're a ~70-person team making a big impact. Join us as a customer-focused ML Engineer to own and scale our ML pipelines from research to deployment. In this position, you’ll have the opportunity to work with Samuel Warren, Kenneth H., Samuel Weiss, Stephen Ripley, and Scott Sundvor! Interested or know someone who might be? Apply here: https://lnkd.in/g3qpzb2J
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Stephen Ripley shared thisRoded is one of those engineers who has a limitless appetite for curiosity and can wear almost any hat. He has great EQ, is a great cultural addition to any team. He is a fearless developer, willing to move quickly and will move your engineering projects forward. If you're hiring or know someone who is, you should talk to him. Feel free to reach out to me if you want an intro.Stephen Ripley shared thisHi everyone! I’m seeking a new role and would appreciate your support. If you hear of any opportunities or just want to catch up, please send me a message or comment below. I’d love to reconnect. #OpenToWork About me & what I’m looking for: 💼 I’m looking for Staff or Senior Software Engineer roles. Can do full stack but frontend is my preferred area. 🌎 I’m open to roles in San Jose, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale, remote or hybrid roles preferred. ⭐ I’ve previously worked at Instrumental Inc. The Easy Company / RemixAI and Chegg (9.5 years)
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Stephen Ripley reposted thisStephen Ripley reposted thisTariff Talk is back — LIVE tomorrow (4/10) at 11AM PST. We’re reconvening our expert panel that has been through it all: - Jen McCabe – PwC, formerly Flex, and Jabil will provide the EMS perspective - Scott Raymond – Advisor, former eero will provide the brand perspective and factory move experience - Gabrielle Griffith – BPE Global will provide her expertise in trade compliance This is our Build Better take on Car Talk — for the operations, supply chain, and engineering leaders building electronics. Get answers. Register here→ https://lnkd.in/dbtqgnvt
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Stephen Ripley shared thisDope tech = dope engineering teamStephen Ripley shared thisLove it when our customers see Instrumental Inc. in action on their lines for the first time.
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Stephen Ripley shared thisML Engineers work in partnership with the rest of Instrumental's engineering team and customers to find solutions for some of the world's biggest manufacturing brands. If you measure success in days rather than weeks and have a strong problem-solving mentality rooted in AI or ML, you'll be a great fit for Instrumental. https://lnkd.in/gDKNkCJc
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Stephen Ripley reposted thisStephen Ripley reposted thisOk, l’app è sugli store e ne siamo felici ma non basta. Quest’estate ci è venuto in mente che avremmo voluto fare qualcosa, inizialmente di piccolo ma capillare e diffuso, che ci aiutasse a diffondere l’easycrazia - movimento di semplificazione della burocrazia - come approccio alla vita pratica di tutti i giorni. Oggi partono ufficialmente i Bonus Days, giorni di guerrilla, eventi online e social bombing per cominciare a fare informazione su tematiche come il non take-up, il diritto allo studio e le opportunità perse. Durante i Bonus Days, gli studenti universitari potranno partecipare ad eventi gratuiti e attività di guerrilla marketing davanti alle università di Milano e con associazioni studentesche a Milano, Roma, Torino, Bologna e Salerno, mentre in app il servizio di richiesta dell’ISEE Universitario sarà gratuito per un mese. Vi aspettiamo numerosissimi a LaunchX, un’oretta di chiacchiere, birrette, quiz e networking con i founder, il team di BonusX, studenti e content creator, trovate tutto tutto qui 👇 https://lnkd.in/dHJzW36d
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Stephen Ripley liked thisStephen Ripley liked thisAPPA - an agentic security layer I recently bragged about - was just accepted to NeurIPS workshop Agents in the Wild: Safety, Security, and Beyond. So those who were on the fence whether it is worth trying - here is one more reason to look at! Honestly, as a person with non-academic background, I am proud of that milestone. Thanks to my co-authors Innokentii Konstantinov Vadim Liventsev Matvey Kukuy Ildar Iskhakov
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Stephen Ripley liked thisStephen Ripley liked thisGetting from $1M to $100M in ARR took us 18 months. The second hundred took less than six. Last week Legora passed $200M. 130,000 lawyers now use Legora on a monthly basis, across 2,100 firms and legal teams in more than 80 countries. Two things from this year I would not have predicted: The first is how fast the US moved. 18 months ago we had no office in North America. Today over half of the AmLaw 50 work with us, out of our offices in New York, Denver, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco and Toronto. The US is our largest market by revenue. The second is where the demand is coming from. More than 40% of our new customers are now in-house legal teams, including Air Canada, Salesforce and Palo Alto Networks. Two thank-yous, before we get back to work. To our customers, who backed a small company from Stockholm with a lot to prove, and who still tell us plainly when we get something wrong. And to the team, engineers and lawyers sitting next to each other, who turn that into something better, faster than any group I have worked with.
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Stephen Ripley liked thisStephen Ripley liked thisI usually don’t post personal stuff on this platform. However, I am so proud of my youngest, Emilio De Palm , I’m breaking my rule. https://lnkd.in/gbn669_t
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Stephen Ripley liked thisStephen Ripley liked thisFounders, holding onto "What Good Looks Like" is a recipe for failure. Instead: Define what good looks like. Digging into a problem, interviewing stakeholders, discovery learning. A path to incremental improvement. A design without a real place. A startup that investors pass over. Analysis leading to failure. The spark of innovation takes creativity. Synthesis. 💡 Create Guiding Lights. A written definition of good, built for the specific people you're trying to help. By design, your solution will be differentiated and superior for a precision segment of the market. Translation? Different and better for people who will actually buy and use your product. That's a top-tier test investors use. Begin with the end in mind. Design it that way. Work backwards. Define what good looks like. Different people will define different guiding lights. That leads to designs with personality. Maybe soul. Different solutions serving the market in different ways is a great way to grow a market and create scaled impact. Instrumental Inc. is defining what good looks like in manufacturing with AI. I visited Instrumental, met with Adeeti Katti and Srinath Ganesh, and introduced them to Silicon Valley Engineering Council (SVEC), where I'm VP this year. Instrumental was started by two ex-Apple product design engineers, Anna-Katrina Shedletsky and Samuel Weiss. Their platform ingests the DNA of a manufacturing operation, every data source on the line, and uses AI to define what good looks like. Then it spots drift early. They publish results like Meta saving 900+ engineering weeks a year across 7 programs and NVIDIA cutting 14 days from final tray and rack assembly. Even when medtech isn't high volume, it's high-value. A bad unit that escapes turns into a complaint, maybe an MDR, and sometimes a recall. The value proposition transfers. 🎯 If you build complex electronics, high volume or high value, go look at what they're doing. Instrumental's Build Better event is October 7 on the deck of the USS Hornet in Alameda, part of SF Tech Week. Speakers from NVIDIA, Supermicro, Teradyne, and WHOOP. I'll be there. About Build Better: https://lnkd.in/ggM2XSpj Instrumental: https://instrumental.com SVEC: https://www.svec.org/ Instrumental defines good with data on the manufacturing line. You can define it on a whiteboard before the line exists. That one is free. 💬 What are the guiding lights for the medtech solution you're building right now? One sentence in the comments and I'll DM back with resources to help. ♻️ Repost so a founder you know sees this. Follow �� Chris Danek for more on startups and breakthrough innovations.
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Stephen Ripley liked thisStephen Ripley liked thisJev isn’t a technical revolution, but it’s a masterclass in product design. Under the hood, it’s not alien technology. It’s certainly better than a raw zero-shot BERT, naive MNLI pipelines, or off-the-shelf open rerankers. But that’s not why everyone is talking about it. The real win is product scoping: they carved out a precise, painful sub-task and wrapped it into a clean API. It triggered an instant psychological reaction across engineering teams (including mine): “Wait, what in our pipeline can we immediately offload to this?” The irony? If you sit down with a calculator, modern Flash models aren’t dramatically different from Jev. Pricing is negligible for both, latency deltas are modest, and general-purpose LLMs often match or beat the quality. Yet packaging wins. A dedicated, non-generative "System 1" primitive sells the architectural idea of separation of concerns 10x better than another generic prompt template. We just tested Jev against Sonnet 5 and open-weight models on 100 real agent tool calls to see where reality lives (spoiler: beating the 79% constant baseline is harder than it looks, and our entire API bill was $0.37). Full writeup and benchmark breakdown: https://lnkd.in/dH5GNqcxWe Tested Jev on 100 Real Agent Calls. How Easy Is It To Beat a Constant?We Tested Jev on 100 Real Agent Calls. How Easy Is It To Beat a Constant?
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Stephen Ripley liked thisStephen Ripley liked thisDon't miss out on the opportunity to simplify government bureaucracy and improve lives with us! Looking forward to your applications 🚀💙
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Stephen Ripley liked thisStephen Ripley liked thisWe interviewed two dozen engineering leaders in private tech companies about how they're using AI in software development today. Almost everyone had some stat like "95% of our code is now AI-generated." That’s a given these days and just counts lines of code which came out of the model. The more interesting story is in the details. Five conclusions stood out: 1. Wide dispersion of competence. Some teams are still in the early innings, with one-shot prompting and individuals building their own tools. Others have structured, spec-driven workflows, harnesses managing multiple agents used by the entire team, and they are reporting the biggest improvements. Most importantly you can see them shipping production features in weeks not months. 2. Code generation is just the start. Writing new code has only been 20–40% of the job. Designing, debugging, reviewing, maintaining is “real” software development, and AI is just beginning to change that. Which is why we heard simultaneously "all of our code is AI-generated" and "we're only modestly faster". 3. Current limitation is verification/QA. Most developers now have open 4 windows, and the best ones are spinning up 20 agents in parallel. Testing that output, making sure it is secure, scalable, compliant, i.e. enterprise-grade, and maintainable it is still hard. Generation is cheap, verification/QA/evals are limited by humans. At most companies have automated only 25% of QA through AI. 4. New code is easier to build. Code generation looks amazing when you're starting from scratch with a small, well-specified code. It gets much harder with monolithic legacy code bases especially in languages not well suited for code gen. That's one reason why AI-native companies are moving so fast: they have smaller, clean codebases, and why enterprises lag: legacy systems plus complex reviews. It's also part of the reason why some senior engineers resist using AI. The other limiting factor is frankly the love of the craft: some developers simply enjoy writing code by hand, it is the reason they went into the profession. 5. Building AI into your product is a much harder problem. Writing code tolerates making mistakes and can be verified as part of the PDLC. Shipping AI to customers means risking non-determinism, evals, latency, cost, and liability. It requires convincing customers that AI is safe and good for them. Which presents a different set of challenges entirely which is why that is proceeding slower. Clearly we're still at the beginning of this wave of. Verification, rewriting legacy systems, and launching AI-native products are almost entirely unbuilt. One caveat: our sample skews to product companies, not internal IT, and didn’t include any frontier labs. We think this is a reasonably representative sample of today startups and therefore the future. Thank you Peter Zatloukal and Eliyahou Amsellem for the partnership and collaboration.
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Stephen Ripley reacted on thisStephen Ripley reacted on thisTengo 53 años y me siento de 30. Tengo proyectos que quiero empezar, lugares que quiero conocer, cosas que quiero aprender y una carrera que todavía tiene muchos capítulos por delante. Pero resulta que, para buena parte del mercado, parece que yo ya estoy saliendo del escenario. (Hagan una búsqueda de “foto de mujer de 55 años” y verán cómo nos pintan). Esta semana leí un artículo en el Substack de Mis Propias Finanzas que me puso a pensar. Hoy, uno de cada cuatro colombianos tiene más de 50 años. En 2050 será uno de cada dos. Ese 25% concentra el 60% del ahorro del país. Pensemos en eso. El 60% del ahorro. ¿Y seguimos obsesionados con conquistar al consumidor de 25? Quizás el problema empieza por cómo las compañías se imaginan los 50: el comienzo de la jubilación, cuando para muchos son el comienzo de otra cosa: una segunda carrera. Un emprendimiento. Viajes. Aprender algo nuevo. Reinventarse. Las empresas que dejen de diseñar para la edad que dice la cédula y empiecen a diseñar para la vida que la gente todavía quiere vivir van a encontrar una oportunidad enorme. Los que están emprendiendo: ¿Ya pensaron en eso?
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Stephen Ripley liked thisCongratulations to my fearless leader and friend Caren Maio! So well deserved.Stephen Ripley liked thisGlobeSt. proudly recognizes Caren Maio as a 2026 GlobeSt. Woman of Influence! ✨ This esteemed recognition celebrates women who are driving innovation, creating meaningful impact, and helping shape the future of commercial real estate. Through their leadership and commitment to excellence, these remarkable professionals continue to elevate our industry, inspire the next generation of leaders, and deliver lasting value to the communities and organizations they serve. Read more on their story: https://lnkd.in/ee-QgpJs
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