Overview

Instacart’s Home & Cross-Retailer Search teams are responsible for how customers first discover where and what to shop: from the personalized Home experience to search across thousands of retailers and items. We own the systems that decide which retailers, items, and content to show, how fast they appear, and how well they match customer intent across platforms.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Home & Cross-Retailer Search team, you will sit at the intersection of retrieval, distributed systems, and machine learning building the infrastructure that determines what tens of millions of Instacart customers see, find, and buy every day.

About the Job

• Define and drive the multi-year technical vision for Home and Cross-Retailer Search infrastructure, spanning retrieval, ranking, indexing, and personalization at scale.
• Own the architecture of Instacart's cross-retailer search platform, ensuring correctness, freshness, and low latency as catalog and query volume grows.
• Own Home feed ranking and content strategy, retailer selection, and personalized recommendations driven by real-time and batch ML signals.
• Partner with ML Platform and Applied Science to productionize ranking models and improve experimentation infrastructure - A/B testing, interleaving, and offline eval
• Accelerate developer velocity across the sub-pillar: reduce time-to-production, build reusable components, and make it easy for product teams to experiment with minimal platform friction.
• Set the technical bar through design reviews, reliability standards, latency budgets, and observability practices.
• Lead major cross-org initiatives end-to-end, from scoping through rollout and post-launch ownership.
• Represent the engineering perspective in product and business planning, translating ambiguous problems into well-scoped technical strategies with clear tradeoffs
• Mentor and grow engineers across Home and XRS teams.

We're looking for someone energized by operating at this intersection - comfortable making hard tradeoffs, and able to influence technical strategy across organizational boundaries.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of leading large-scale distributed systems in production
• Demonstrated experience as a technical lead or architect on cross-team, multi-quarter initiatives  driving alignment, making hard tradeoffs, and delivering results
• Deep expertise in backend systems: high-throughput APIs, data pipelines, caching strategies, and storage systems.
• Experience building or scaling search, recommendations, or feed-ranking systems at significant traffic volume
• Strong command of system design principles: reliability, fault tolerance, observability, graceful degradation
• Proficiency in one or more of: Ruby, Go, Python, Java, or similar backend languages; comfort across the stack to debug and contribute where needed
• Strong communication skills - able to write crisp technical documents and drive alignment across engineering, product, and business stakeholders
• BS/MS in Computer Science, a related field.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience at a marketplace or e-commerce platform with complex catalog, inventory, or fulfillment constraints
• Familiarity with ML serving infrastructure, feature stores, and online/offline evaluation frameworks
• Experience with real-time data pipelines (Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming) and search indexing at scale (Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch)
• Track record of improving developer productivity and platform health: reducing p99 latency, improving cost efficiency and cutting incident rates.
• Prior work on personalization systems using collaborative filtering, contextual bandits, or session-based signals

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OVERVIEW

Instacart’s Home & Cross-Retailer Search teams are responsible for how customers first discover where and what to shop: from the personalized Home experience to search across thousands of retailers and items. We own the systems that decide which retailers, items, and content to show, how fast they appear, and how well they match customer intent across platforms.

You will own the web platform architecture that powers discovery at scale: defining how our frontend systems are structured, how data flows from server to client, and how we make those experiences fast and reliable across platforms. This is a high-scope role that spans multiple product surfaces and requires close collaboration with engineering, product, design, and machine learning teams.

About the Job

• Set the technical direction for Instacart's home and search web experiences, including architecture decisions around rendering, data fetching, and client performance.
• Build innovative features that help customers discover new retailers and deepen engagement with existing ones.
• Drive improvements to Core Web Vitals, page load performance, and overall frontend health.
• Improve SEO and organic discovery to help new customers find Instacart.
• Partner with ML and backend teams to surface personalized, real-time search and recommendations on the web.
• Mentor senior engineers and grow engineering capability across the team.

We're looking for someone who is comfortable with ambiguity, has a bias toward action, and can influence technical strategy across organizational boundaries.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• Extensive experience in a senior/staff engineer role with a strong focus on web systems design and frontend architecture.
• Deep expertise in modern web technologies (React, TypeScript, Next.js etc.) with the ability to reason about end-to-end system architecture across client and server.
• Proven experience designing and operating large-scale web platforms supporting multiple product surfaces.
• Ability to dive deep into web performance optimization  rendering, Core Web Vitals, bundle size, caching strategies, and client-side data fetching.
• Experience leading engineering design reviews and influencing technical decisions across teams.
• Experience building web systems used and maintained by large engineering organizations (30+ engineers).
• Strong communication skills and the ability to influence technical strategy across organizational boundaries.
• Track record of mentoring engineers and driving long-term technical vision.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in Search, Recommendations, Personalization, or related discovery platforms is a huge plus.
• Experience with hybrid architectures, webview-based client systems, or cross-platform web rendering.
• Experience partnering closely with machine learning, product, and design teams.
• Experience building frontend platforms or design systems that support multiple feature teams at scale.
• Understanding of the online grocery, marketplace, or e-commerce ecosystem.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science or a related field.

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Overview

Instacarts Data Infrastructure organization builds and operates the systems that power our company’s data ecosystem, including a modern open data lakehouse on Apache Iceberg, a multi-engine compute platform for stream and analytical workloads, and self-serve tooling that helps Product, Data Science, ML, Ads, Finance, and engineering teams move fast with data.

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Data Governance and Foundations Team. In this role, you’ll serve as a senior technical leader owning the architecture and delivery of our open lakehouse foundation, governance and access patterns, and multi-engine compute strategy—balancing today’s reliability with the next three to five years of scale, maturity, and cost efficiency.

You’ll collaborate closely with engineering leadership and stakeholders across Data Science, ML Platform, Ads Infrastructure, Finance Engineering, Product Engineering, and Security. You’ll operate with a high degree of ownership in a fast-paced environment where architectural decisions have real technical and financial consequences. If you thrive on complex, high-scale challenges and roll-up-your-sleeves execution, this is a chance to shape the backbone of Instacart’s data platform.

Our stack includes technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Trino, ClickHouse, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent, Airflow, dbt, Delta Lake, Scala, Python, Postgres, and AWS. You’ll join a focused team of 7 engineers that values pragmatism, clarity, and impact.

About the Job

• Translate Instacart’s data strategy (e.g., monetization, federated access, real-time) into an actionable multi-year architecture roadmap; align with leadership while evolving the platform for scale, maturity, and cost efficiency.
• Own the open lakehouse foundation: define and deliver unified table formats, storage governance, and a multi-engine compute portfolio (interactive, batch, streaming) that enables portability and prevents lock-in.
• Drive real-time and streaming infrastructure for critical use cases (Ads, Fraud, ML): set deployment patterns, SLAs, and operational practices that balance performance, availability, and spend.
• Pioneer AI-native data infrastructure engineering by applying LLM/AI tools to the platform lifecycle—accelerating development, automation, observability, and cost optimization—and partnering to embed AI-powered capabilities into the platform.
• Elevate engineering excellence: lead architecture reviews, mentor senior/staff engineers, influence hiring, and clearly communicate complex trade-offs to both technical and executive audiences to ensure cross-org alignment.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating data infrastructure or distributed systems at production scale.
• Hands-on expertise with modern data lakehouse architectures and open table formats (e.g., Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi) and with distributed query/compute engines (e.g., Trino, Spark, ClickHouse), including performance tuning and production reliability.
• Experience with event-driven and streaming infrastructure (e.g., Kafka, Flink) for real-time pipelines and serving systems.
• Proven ownership of major platform transitions or migrations (build vs. buy, migration design, risk management) delivered to production.
• Ability to build cost/benefit and TCO models for infrastructure investments and to drive alignment via clear architecture docs and strategy memos across multiple teams and leadership levels.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing platform-level governance controls and familiarity with compliance frameworks (e.g., SOX, CPRA, GDPR).
• FinOps experience optimizing data platform spend, including managing multi-million dollar infrastructure budgets and negotiating vendor contracts.
• Deep SQL proficiency and strong skills in Python or Scala for systems-level development.
• Experience with orchestration (e.g., Apache Airflow) and data transformation pipelines (e.g., dbt) in large-scale production environments.
• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

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Overview

Instacart’s Data Infrastructure organization builds and operates the systems that power our company’s data ecosystem, including a modern open data lakehouse on Apache Iceberg, a multi-engine compute platform for stream and analytical workloads, and self-serve tooling that helps Product, Data Science, ML, Ads, Finance, and engineering teams move fast with data.

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure to join our Data Governance and Foundations Team. In this role, you’ll serve as a senior technical leader owning the architecture and delivery of our open lakehouse foundation, governance and access patterns, and multi-engine compute strategy—balancing today’s reliability with the next three to five years of scale, maturity, and cost efficiency.

You’ll collaborate closely with engineering leadership and stakeholders across Data Science, ML Platform, Ads Infrastructure, Finance Engineering, Product Engineering, and Security. You’ll operate with a high degree of ownership in a fast-paced environment where architectural decisions have real technical and financial consequences. If you thrive on complex, high-scale challenges and roll-up-your-sleeves execution, this is a chance to shape the backbone of Instacart’s data platform.

Our stack includes technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Trino, ClickHouse, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent, Airflow, dbt, Delta Lake, Scala, Python, Postgres, and AWS. You’ll join a focused team of 7 engineers that values pragmatism, clarity, and impact.

About the Job

• Translate Instacart’s data strategy (e.g., monetization, federated access, real-time) into an actionable multi-year architecture roadmap; align with leadership while evolving the platform for scale, maturity, and cost efficiency.
• Own the open lakehouse foundation: define and deliver unified table formats, storage governance, and a multi-engine compute portfolio (interactive, batch, streaming) that enables portability and prevents lock-in.
• Drive real-time and streaming infrastructure for critical use cases (Ads, Fraud, ML): set deployment patterns, SLAs, and operational practices that balance performance, availability, and spend.
• Pioneer AI-native data infrastructure engineering by applying LLM/AI tools to the platform lifecycle—accelerating development, automation, observability, and cost optimization—and partnering to embed AI-powered capabilities into the platform.
• Elevate engineering excellence: lead architecture reviews, mentor senior/staff engineers, influence hiring, and clearly communicate complex trade-offs to both technical and executive audiences to ensure cross-org alignment.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating data infrastructure or distributed systems at production scale.
• Hands-on expertise with modern data lakehouse architectures and open table formats (e.g., Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi) and with distributed query/compute engines (e.g., Trino, Spark, ClickHouse), including performance tuning and production reliability.
• Experience with event-driven and streaming infrastructure (e.g., Kafka, Flink) for real-time pipelines and serving systems.
• Proven ownership of major platform transitions or migrations (build vs. buy, migration design, risk management) delivered to production.
• Ability to build cost/benefit and TCO models for infrastructure investments and to drive alignment via clear architecture docs and strategy memos across multiple teams and leadership levels.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing platform-level governance controls and familiarity with compliance frameworks (e.g., SOX, CPRA, GDPR).
• FinOps experience optimizing data platform spend, including managing multi-million dollar infrastructure budgets and negotiating vendor contracts.
• Deep SQL proficiency and strong skills in Python or Scala for systems-level development.
• Experience with orchestration (e.g., Apache Airflow) and data transformation pipelines (e.g., dbt) in large-scale production environments.
• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

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Overview

Instacart’s Shopper Activation & Engagement team owns the complete shopper lifecycle—from activation and onboarding through engagement, earnings, quality and ratings, recognition, retention, and safety. Our mission is to help millions of shoppers get started, succeed, and thrive on our marketplace while ensuring compliance and operational excellence.

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to serve as the Activation Domain Tech Lead. In this role, you’ll define the technical strategy and architecture for critical shopper activation surfaces such as onboarding funnel optimization, waitlist management, supply levers, and compliance systems. You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, Data Science, Operations, Legal, Trust & Safety, and key onboarding vendors to deliver fast, safe, and scalable solutions.

This is a high-impact role where your work directly influences shopper supply, marketplace efficiency, and our ability to scale sustainably while maintaining quality and regulatory standards. If you thrive in fast-moving, highly cross-functional environments and enjoy rolling up your sleeves to solve complex problems at scale, you’ll feel right at home here. We go far together, communicate with candor, and prioritize solutions where everyone can win.

About the Job

• Define and drive the end-to-end technical strategy and architecture for the activation domain, enabling rapid, safe delivery as the roadmap scales to support millions of shoppers.
• Lead product strategy in partnership with Product and Design across onboarding funnel optimization, waitlist management, incentives, and supply levers; set clear OKRs, instrumentation, and experimentation plans.
• Own delivery of business-critical compliance and vendor initiatives (e.g., background checks, identity/eligibility workflows), building auditable, privacy-first systems with strong observability and SLAs.
• Run large, cross-functional programs across multiple engineering and business teams; translate ambiguous requirements into crisp technical plans, manage risk and dependencies, and unblock execution.
• Mentor and develop engineers through design reviews, high-quality code practices, and clear technical standards; raise the technical bar and cultivate the next generation of technical leaders.
• Continuously improve reliability, performance, and cost efficiency of services; establish and enforce SLOs, drive incident learnings, and champion secure-by-default, AI-augmented development workflows.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, high-traffic services, or mobile backends.
• 3+ years owning end-to-end architecture and technical strategy for a domain or product area, from design through production operations.
• Proven track record leading cross-functional initiatives across 3+ teams and delivering under hard deadlines in ambiguous problem spaces.
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages (e.g., Go, Java, Python) and with modern cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS or GCP) and data stores (e.g., Postgres, DynamoDB, Redis).
• Hands-on experience building AI tooling or agentic automation and integrating AI into developer workflows or product features.
• Experience designing compliant systems involving identity, eligibility, certifications, or similarly sensitive workflows, with privacy and security best practices.
• Demonstrated mentorship and team development experience, including leveling up engineers through design guidance and rigorous code reviews.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience partnering with Legal/Policy on compliance-related projects and navigating evolving labor or regulatory requirements; familiarity with audit trails and policy engines.
• Background in evaluating, integrating, and managing third-party vendors; establishing technical SLAs; and executing zero-downtime migrations and fallback strategies.
• Experience with experimentation platforms, analytics, and growth funnels to improve conversion, supply availability, and utilization.
• Experience building mobile-first products or collaborating closely with iOS/Android teams on shopper experiences.
• Familiarity with trust & safety, fraud/identity, or background screening systems in high-scale marketplaces.
• Experience in marketplace, logistics, rideshare, or gig-economy environments.

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Overview

Instacart’s Shopper Activation & Engagement team owns the complete shopper lifecycle—from activation and onboarding through engagement, earnings, quality and ratings, recognition, retention, and safety. Our mission is to help millions of shoppers get started, succeed, and thrive on our marketplace while ensuring compliance and operational excellence.

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to serve as the Activation Domain Tech Lead. In this role, you’ll define the technical strategy and architecture for critical shopper activation surfaces such as onboarding funnel optimization, waitlist management, supply levers, and compliance systems. You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, Data Science, Operations, Legal, Trust & Safety, and key onboarding vendors to deliver fast, safe, and scalable solutions.

This is a high-impact role where your work directly influences shopper supply, marketplace efficiency, and our ability to scale sustainably while maintaining quality and regulatory standards. If you thrive in fast-moving, highly cross-functional environments and enjoy rolling up your sleeves to solve complex problems at scale, you’ll feel right at home here. We go far together, communicate with candor, and prioritize solutions where everyone can win.

About the Job

• Define and drive the end-to-end technical strategy and architecture for the activation domain, enabling rapid, safe delivery as the roadmap scales to support millions of shoppers.
• Lead product strategy in partnership with Product and Design across onboarding funnel optimization, waitlist management, incentives, and supply levers; set clear OKRs, instrumentation, and experimentation plans.
• Own delivery of business-critical compliance and vendor initiatives (e.g., background checks, identity/eligibility workflows), building auditable, privacy-first systems with strong observability and SLAs.
• Run large, cross-functional programs across multiple engineering and business teams; translate ambiguous requirements into crisp technical plans, manage risk and dependencies, and unblock execution.
• Mentor and develop engineers through design reviews, high-quality code practices, and clear technical standards; raise the technical bar and cultivate the next generation of technical leaders.
• Continuously improve reliability, performance, and cost efficiency of services; establish and enforce SLOs, drive incident learnings, and champion secure-by-default, AI-augmented development workflows.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, high-traffic services, or mobile backends.
• 3+ years owning end-to-end architecture and technical strategy for a domain or product area, from design through production operations.
• Proven track record leading cross-functional initiatives across 3+ teams and delivering under hard deadlines in ambiguous problem spaces.
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages (e.g., Go, Java, Python) and with modern cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS or GCP) and data stores (e.g., Postgres, DynamoDB, Redis).
• Hands-on experience building AI tooling or agentic automation and integrating AI into developer workflows or product features.
• Experience designing compliant systems involving identity, eligibility, certifications, or similarly sensitive workflows, with privacy and security best practices.
• Demonstrated mentorship and team development experience, including leveling up engineers through design guidance and rigorous code reviews.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience partnering with Legal/Policy on compliance-related projects and navigating evolving labor or regulatory requirements; familiarity with audit trails and policy engines.
• Background in evaluating, integrating, and managing third-party vendors; establishing technical SLAs; and executing zero-downtime migrations and fallback strategies.
• Experience with experimentation platforms, analytics, and growth funnels to improve conversion, supply availability, and utilization.
• Experience building mobile-first products or collaborating closely with iOS/Android teams on shopper experiences.
• Familiarity with trust & safety, fraud/identity, or background screening systems in high-scale marketplaces.
• Experience in marketplace, logistics, rideshare, or gig-economy environments.

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Overview

As a Staff Software Engineer on the FoodStorm team, you will play a pivotal role in modernizing FoodStorm’s on demand ordering, catering, and prepared food platform. You’ll contribute to rearchitecting the system using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach, with a focus on building efficient, scalable, and maintainable solutions. With hands-on coding, deep problem-solving, and close collaboration with cross-functional teams—including an international engineering team in Australia—you’ll help improve the platform’s performance, reliability, and integration with Instacart systems. This role requires strong ownership of deliverables, as well as a proactive approach to technical challenges.

The FoodStorm team is leading the evolution of on demand ordering, catering, and prepared food management systems, empowering Instacart’s retail and grocery partners to streamline operations and expand their reach. We work on high-impact projects, providing solutions for seamless order management, partner integrations, and end-customer experiences. We value high levels of ownership, independence, technical excellence, and an entrepreneurial spirit.

About the Job

• Actively contribute to the rearchitecture of FoodStorm’s platform, focusing on scalability and maintainability through a service-oriented approach.
• Implement high-quality software solutions to enable seamless integration between FoodStorm and Instacart’s systems.
• Conduct hands-on coding, technical problem-solving, and system optimization.
• Collaborate closely with engineers, product managers, and designers across teams to ensure alignment on technical strategy and implementation.
• Partner with the Australia-based engineering team, ensuring effective collaboration during overlapping work hours (~2 hours daily).
• Provide technical mentorship to peers, fostering a culture of learning and continuous improvement.
• Help identify and implement best practices to improve the team’s efficiency and system performance.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years experience designing, building, and maintaining scalable systems and distributed architectures.
• Proficiency in a modern programming language such as Python, Java, C#, or similar.
• Strong hands-on experience with backend development and system integration.
• Proven ability to solve complex technical problems in a collaborative environment.
• Excellent communication and teamwork skills, with experience working across time zones (including ~2-hour overlap with Australia).
• Strong sense of ownership and accountability for delivering high-quality results.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with .NET Core, SOA patterns, and API integrations is a plus.
• Experience working on system modernization or large-scale technical migrations (e.g., monolithic to SOA).
• Experience with front-end web development.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• Knowledge of grocery retail, catering, or enterprise platform technologies.
• A commitment to developing and deploying reliable, performant tools that deliver excellent partner and customer experiences.

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Overview

About the Role

Join our team as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer I, where your expertise will play a crucial role in maintaining the backbone of our platform's operations. You'll take on challenges directly, ensuring optimal performance and growth while fostering a culture that prioritizes diligent and effective reliability practices. We're seeking someone eager to take ownership, skilled at addressing complex issues, and ready to explore innovative solutions to support the well-being of our teams and services.

About the Team

The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team combines software and systems engineering to design and manage large-scale, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. This team is tasked with ensuring high reliability, optimal system performance, and continuous improvement for both Instacart's critical internal services and externally facing systems.

SRE focuses on optimizing existing systems, building robust infrastructure, and automating processes to minimize manual effort. Joining the SRE team means facing unique scaling challenges while leveraging expertise in coding, algorithms, complexity analysis, and large-scale system design.

The team thrives within a culture of intellectual curiosity, problem-solving, and collaboration. With members from diverse backgrounds and experiences, SRE fosters a supportive and risk-tolerant environment where individuals are encouraged to think big, take on impactful projects, and grow with mentorship and guidance.

About the Job

• Develop scalable infrastructure strategies to ensure high availability, that align infrastructure planning with product roadmaps, and optimize cost, risk and performance with cloud providers. 
• Establish and lead incident management protocols and response plans to coordinate rapid responses, investigate root causes, prevent recurrence, and collaborate with security teams to test response readiness and address security risks. 
• Continuously monitor performance metrics and trends to proactively identify reliability risks. Regularly refine SLOs, SLIs, and Error Budgets to align with evolving standards and leverage data insights to propose improvement plans and suggest architectural updates to enhance system reliability.
• Oversee regular system evaluations to pinpoint and refine process shortcomings and lead cross-functional projects that promote system optimization and minimize technical debt. Collaborate with product and engineering teams to ensure system enhancements align with user requirements.
• Design and deploy automation tools to streamline deployment and operations, ensuring seamless processes while overseeing the continuous enhancement of automation scripts and frameworks, and rigorously monitor automated systems for performance and reliability. Address and tackle issues in automated environments promptly to reduce disruptions.
• Provide technical guidance to junior colleagues, fostering a collaborative culture for problem-solving and innovation. Organize and lead knowledge-sharing sessions and coordinate training in site reliability best practices to enhance team proficiency.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• Proven experience in programming
• Robust knowledge of incident management processes and tools
• Exemplary troubleshooting and problem-solving skills
• Ability to work under pressure and prioritize tasks during high-stress situations
• Expertise in scaling application infrastructure for high availability

Preferred Qualifications

• Proficient in Ruby or Go
• Experience with cloud platforms (eg, AWS, GCP, Azure) and containerization (eg, Docker, Kubernetes)
• Skill in risk assessment for foundational infrastructure changes
• Experience in monitoring system performance and trend analysis

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Overview

This role challenges traditional approaches to digital shopping by improving backend systems that power a seamless user journey. You will lead efforts to enhance content discoverability and purchase processes, helping to perfect the interaction between user desires and our vast product offerings.

The Senior Software Engineer will focus on enhancing the user experience by developing robust backend architectures that support advanced recommendation and personalization systems. In close collaboration with ML engineers, product teams, and data scientists, you will lead the innovation of our backend services, enabling sophisticated, data-driven features that adapt to our customers' shopping behaviors.

The Core Experience teams are dedicated to creating engaging and straightforward shopping experiences. You will be part of a team that is at the heart of product innovation, focusing on everything from the user interfaces to the underlying systems that support our web and mobile platforms. Our team’s work is guided by a data-driven methodology that ensures decisions are aligned with consumer needs, helping us move swiftly and efficiently in our development processes.

Overview of the Core Experiences teams that are currently hiring:

Order Quality:

The Order Quality Team at Instacart is dedicated to delivering a seamless and dependable online grocery experience by ensuring every order is picked and delivered with the highest level of accuracy and care. We are responsible for the end to end post-checkout journey, which includes building intelligent replacement algorithms, providing real-time order status updates, and managing communication channels through SMS, push notifications, and live activity tracking. Our team also oversees features such as item summary pages, chat, cancellations and rescheduling, post-checkout pickup experience, and post order feedback, always striving to recover gracefully when things don’t go as planned. The Order Quality Team plays a vital role in creating transparency and control for customers, embodying Instacart’s commitment to operational excellence and innovation at scale.

About the Job

• Design, build, and maintain high-quality backend applications.
• Lead the development of our backend system's roadmap, prioritizing scalability and reliability.
• Innovate and think creatively to develop new features that enhance our customer's shopping experiences.
• Own and lead major components of our product, ensuring they meet both internal standards and external expectations.
• Collaborate across teams to foster a unified approach to product development, facilitating consensus and driving effective outcomes.
• Responsible for the strategic planning and execution of projects you oversee, from inception to deployment and maintenance.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend development experience, with a strong record of project delivery.
• Proficiency in backend languages, such as Ruby or Go.
• A solid foundation in unit testing and problem-solving.
• Exceptional communication skills and the ability to lead and collaborate with diverse teams.
• Holds a Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with recommender systems and personalization algorithms.
• Familiarity with ML model development and iteration.
• Deep understanding of feed architecture principles.
• Skilled in the use of monitoring and observability tools like Datadog.
• Extensive experience with database management, particularly PostgreSQL.

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Overview

Join Instacart's mission to transform grocery shopping through frontier AI. As a Senior Software Engineer on AI Labs & Foundations, you will design, build, and operate the high-scale production systems that power our most ambitious AI experiences—from Cart Assistant, our conversational shopping agent, to voice AI interactions and beyond. This is a high-impact opportunity to work at the intersection of robust software engineering and cutting-edge production AI/ML, directly shaping products used by millions of customers every day.

About the Role

We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer who will participate in the design and delivery of production AI systems, identify high-leverage technical opportunities, and contribute hands-on to AI-native products across Instacart's platform. We value bottom-up ideas, high engineering quality, and close partnership with Product, Data Science, ML, and Infrastructure teams. If you enjoy inventing, navigating ambiguity, prototyping fast, and turning wild ideas into real, scalable products, this is the team for you.

About the Team

AI Labs & Foundations sits at the intersection of frontier AI research and production engineering. Our portfolio spans the full stack of AI innovation at Instacart, including building and launching Cart Assistant, pioneering voice AI interactions, and constructing the foundational systems that power these cutting-edge experiences. We are a fast-moving, collaborative team that thrives on 0-to-1 thinking, shares learnings openly, and ships with urgency by prototyping fast and testing rigorously.

About the Job

• Design, build, and operate production AI-powered systems and agentic experiences (including Cart Assistant and voice AI) that directly impact how millions of customers shop.
• Build foundational systems for cutting-edge AI experiences, ranging from embedding infrastructure and voice AI pipelines, to client facing components and integrations, by prototyping bold ideas and productizing what works.
• Integrate foundation models via APIs and open-source frameworks; apply techniques like retrieval-augmented generation and vector search where appropriate.
• Own projects end-to-end: requirements, technical design, implementation, testing, deployment, observability, and iterative improvement focused on reliability, latency, and cost efficiency.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners in product, design, data science, and infrastructure to ship AI features end-to-end.
• Drive engineering excellence, including thoughtful system design, rigorous code review, and technical leadership that includes defining and promoting best practices for AI/ML production engineering across the team.

About You

Minimum Qualifications:

• Proven senior software engineer who has built, shipped, and operated production systems at scale. You make architectural calls, own what you build, and deliver through ambiguity.
• Hands-on experience with AI or ML in production. You've shipped LLM-powered features or integrated foundation model APIs into a live product, demonstrating the necessary expertise at the intersection of robust software engineering and deep production ML.
• Experience owning services end-to-end, including CI/CD, automated testing, observability (logging, metrics, tracing), and on-call participation.
• Strong communicator who partners well across disciplines - you want to get to the right answer, not just defend the first one.
• Excitement and ability to leverage cutting-edge development tools, including AI assistance (e.g., Copilot, Cursor, Claude), to maximize velocity.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 5 to 8+ years of industry experience.
• A track record of 0-to-1 work taking unconventional ideas from prototype through rapid iteration to production.
• Experience building conversational agents, multi-turn dialogue systems, or agentic LLM applications.
• Experience with STT/TTS or natural language interfaces, LLM fine tuning, ML transfer learning, model training and the vocabulary of measurement of model performance.
• Experience with embedding systems, vector search, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, or Elasticsearch).
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP), containers (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Experience with event-driven or distributed systems (e.g., Kafka).
• Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership within cross-functional teams.

Overview

About the Role

As a Senior Engineer on the ML/AI platform team, you will play a key role in building the internal platform which supports training and deploying AI models across the entire organization. You’ll take ownership of defining the platform to enable AI model fine-tuning and batch inference by building the SDKs and supporting the infra to support these unique workloads. We are looking for someone with high ownership and the ability to be a leader in the space.

About the Team

At Instacart, the ML/AI Platform team is a critical part of enabling the business across all areas. From owning the online/offline feature store to the serving and training layer, our team enables the entire business to succeed. We take pride in having extreme levels of ownership and high levels of collaboration. You will be working closely with seasoned engineers and leaders across the company to drive specific use cases end to end. Our work directly impacts the success of Instacart.

About the Job 

• Excited to build platform-level tools, SDKs
• Ability to manage cross-cutting stakeholder relationships, prioritizing customer needs first
• Eager to navigate ambiguous, hairy, and technical problem spaces
• Eager to jump into domains, languages, and problem areas that might be new and unfamiliar

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 3 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages
• 2 years of experience in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems, and 1 years of experience leading projects and providing technical leadership
• Strong proficiency in maintaining high standards for production services
• Rapid coding skills and management of production services
• Experience with high scale throughput and distributed systems problems

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong communication skills and ability to contextualize problems across various audiences
• Skilled at navigating ambiguity and involving the right stakeholders to address issues efficiently
• Experience building and shipping products to users 
• Expertise  building platforms and high scale infrastructure
• Visionary thinker capable of generating transformative ideas
• Prior experience working with AI Platforms like Ray is a plus

OVERVIEW

Instacart is powered by a robust set of cloud services. Our backend systems power the clients used by millions of customers every year to buy their groceries online. These systems must also support tight integration with the largest retailers in the US and Canada. Engineering at Instacart provides the opportunity to work on challenging scaling problems while also designing the features that will define our industry. Large-scale caching and storage plays an integral role in delivering efficient, performant experiences to customers. You will have the opportunity to own and build a whole new set of foundational engineering components in an open collaborative environment serving millions of requests daily.

ABOUT THE TEAM

Instacart’s storage needs are ever-evolving and growing. The Database Storage team are stewards of the database infrastructure that supports Instacart’s core lines of business. The scale of this involves hundreds of clusters holding petabytes of data, with continuous 24/7 monitoring and uptime requirements. In response to this dynamic, demanding environment, the nature of our work is to innovate the automated monitoring & control-plane systems that run the clusters, as well as related supporting services like database proxies, snapshotting and backups, working with major cloud providers, supporting multiple environments for development and testing, data privacy and compliance at the infrastructure level. At the same time, we’re investing and preparing for Instacart’s future growth and success with forward-looking architectural shifts including distributed database systems, AI Agent-based monitoring and operations, tiered database storage. We’re focused on solutions that directly impact Instacart through stability, productivity and cost management, visible at the Executive level.

ABOUT THE JOB

If you’re excited by distributed systems at massive scale, real‑time data challenges, and opportunities to shape the future of AI‑powered commerce, this team offers a chance for outsized impact in a fast‑paced environment: 

• You will be a senior engineer in the team responsible for Storage platforms, with a large amount of ownership and autonomy for setting technical direction, reporting to an engineering manager.
• You will work closely with other application engineering teams and internal stakeholders, owning a large part of the process from problem understanding to shipping the solution.
• You will ship high quality, scalable and robust solutions with a sense of urgency.
• You will have the freedom to suggest and drive high-impact initiatives related to Storage solutions that unlock new innovations, accelerate application development, create resiliency & high-availability, and right-size storage needs company-wide.

Instacart's technology is constantly changing and adapting. Some of the technologies you would use at Instacart include:

• Languages: Go, Python and Rust
• Core Platforms: RDS, Postgres, Yugabyte, EC2 and selected GCP services
• Observability and Analytics: Datadog, Cloudwatch, Sentry and Snowflake

If you have experience with these technologies, you will have the opportunity to dive deeper. If you haven't used these technologies you will have the chance to learn from the collective experience of our team.

ABOUT YOU

Minimum Qualifications:

• 5+ years of working experience as a software engineer in one or more large-scale cloud services or application development environment
• 1+ Years of hands-on experience, delivering large-scale solutions with an industry-recognized database (ideally PostgreSQL)
• 1+ Years experience building cloud-based control-plane software
• Self-motivation and an enjoyment for a growth-oriented startup environment
• A strong sense of ownership that drives improvements for customers as well as automation and scale for the systems.
• The drive & ability to dive deep into technical challenges and champion root causes, solving problems correctly.
• You enjoy being highly productive, shipping code, reviewing others’ PRs and iteratively guiding code bases towards best practices and excellence.
• You are able to scale yourself effectively via junior engineers and accelerate the team through effective designs, written & communication, delegation, establishing standards & best practices, code reviews.
• Strong ability to architect and design systems using common back-end Web technologies in a production environment
• An ability to balance a sense of urgency with shipping high quality and pragmatic solutions
• Experience working with a large codebase on a cross functional team, with a knack for driving alignment across teams and stakeholders
• Demonstrated capacity to take existing, complex solutions and evolve them to meet the changing needs of the business. 

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, computer engineering, electrical engineering
• Familiarity with Distributed Databases (Yugabyte, CRDB, TiDB)
• You are a mentor to other software engineers, helping equip them and grow as software development professionals
• You like solving the kind of high-impact, org-wide problems that involve tackling abstract challenges and turning them into concrete programs that deliver successfully

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Overview

Are you ready to take your development skills to the next level? We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Ads team. You’ll play a critical role in the evolution of our Ads suite and help build world-class reporting solutions across various platforms, ensuring that advertisers and retailers receive timely, accurate, and actionable data insights. By working closely with Product Designers, Product Managers, Data Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, and other cross-functional partners, you’ll contribute to the advancement of our Ads suite and guarantee a seamless flow of data to our users.

The Instacart Ads team is at the forefront of refining our Ads products and supporting infrastructure, so your work will directly enhance our capability to process petabyte-scale data and deliver reports essential for billing, strategic decision-making, and partner management.

Our products are used by millions of people every year. To meet–and exceed–expectations we are rapidly improving and modernizing our ads platform, helping raise the quality bar for our products across the entire organization. Sound exciting? Keep reading.

The Ads Solutions Team is a vibrant collective of engineers pioneering new advertising formats at Instacart. Tasked with incubating and scaling cutting-edge ad solutions, our team fuels revenue growth and sustains vital partnerships within the Instacart Retail Media Network. As a beacon of innovation, our suite of display advertising offerings empowers brands to engage and educate consumers.

About the Job

As a Senior Engineer, you'll be integral to a full-stack team driving end-to-end development from client to backend. Known for agility, our team values rapid iteration alongside quality and craft:

• Lead the design and implementation of new ad formats.
• Collaborate across teams and across functions to set product requirements and long-term strategies.
• Uphold and elevate technical standards, ensuring superior code quality, test coverage, and system performance.
• Embrace cross-functional roles and tackle challenges beyond just code to amplify product outcomes.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent proven industry experience (4+ years).
• 5+ years of experience in software engineering.
• Comprehensive understanding of distributed systems, proven experience with data processing technologies such as DBT and Airflow and common web frameworks such as Rails.
• Highly proficient with SQL, capable of writing and reviewing complex queries for data analysis and debugging.
• You can design for scale with the entire system in mind.
• Solid communicator, comfortable seeking and receiving feedback.
• Strong analytical and debugging skills.
• Strong sense of ownership working with a large codebase and diverse suite of products.
• A collaborative mindset to be able to partner with engineers, designers and PM's from multiple teams to co-create impactful solutions while supporting system contributions.
• Strong organizational skills with the ability to communicate and present ideas clearly and influence key stakeholders at the manager, director, and VP level.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior work experience in the digital advertising industry.
• Experience with big data technologies such as Spark, Hadoop, Flink, Hive or Kafka, and with both streaming and batching data pipelines.
• Proven experience with distributed system design.
• Strong general programming and algorithm skills.
• Strong attention to detail and accuracy in the implementation, keen eye for edge cases and code reviews. 
• Data driven mindset.

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About the Team

Instacarts Data Governance & Foundations team builds and operates the core systems that power the company's data ecosystem — a modern data lakehouse at scale, spanning ingestion, stream processing, analytical compute, and self-serve tooling. You'll join a collaborative team of 6–7 engineers responsible for keeping a highly reliable production platform running today while architecting the infrastructure that will serve the business for the next 3–5 years.

This is a high-ownership, high-autonomy role. Architectural decisions carry both technical and financial weight, and you'll be expected to drive direction, not just execute it. You'll work closely with engineering leadership and cross-functional partners across Data Science, ML Platform, Ads Infrastructure, Finance Engineering, and senior stakeholders throughout the organization.

About the Job

• Define and drive multi-year architecture roadmaps for large-scale data ingestion and processing infrastructure, setting technical direction that balances reliability, scalability, and cost.
• Own end-to-end platform initiatives — from build vs. buy decisions and migration design through production rollout and risk management — across Kafka-based streaming and Postgres-based systems.
• Partner with vendors (Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent) on technical integration, contract evaluation, and TCO modeling to inform infrastructure investment decisions.
• Collaborate with various teams to embed governance and compliance controls (SOX, CPRA, GDPR) directly into platform architecture and data lifecycle management.
• Optimize infrastructure spend at scale: identify cost reduction opportunities across compute, storage, and pipeline efficiency; manage multi-million dollar infrastructure budgets.
• Write compelling architecture documents, strategy memos, and proposals that drive alignment with engineering leadership and senior stakeholders across the organization.
• Mentor engineers on the team, model strong engineering culture, and help grow a high-performing data infrastructure organization.
• Collaborate with Data Science, ML Platform, Ads Infrastructure, Finance Engineering, and Product teams to ensure the platform meets evolving needs.

About You

• 5+ years of software engineering focused on data infrastructure or distributed systems at scale, in a high-growth, data-intensive environment.
• Experience in modern data lakehouse architectures and open table formats — Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi — with strong understanding of compute/storage trade-offs.
• Hands-on experience with distributed query and compute systems (Trino, Spark, ClickHouse) including performance tuning and production reliability work.
• Proven depth in event-driven infrastructure: Kafka for high-throughput data ingestion and Flink (or equivalent) for stream processing at scale.
• Track record owning and executing major platform transitions, including migration design, phased rollout, and risk management under production constraints.
• Experience building business cases for infrastructure investments: cost-benefit analysis, TCO modeling, and presenting recommendations to leadership.
• Exceptional written technical communication — clear architecture docs, strategy memos, and cross-team proposals that drive decisions and alignment.
• Strong ownership and comfort operating in ambiguity; ability to drive large, multi-team initiatives from concept to production with organizational influence.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Familiarity with data governance and compliance frameworks (SOX, CPRA, GDPR) and experience designing governance controls into platform architecture.
• Experience with FinOps and data platform cost optimization, including managing large infrastructure budgets and negotiating enterprise vendor contracts.
• Deep SQL expertise and strong proficiency in Python or Scala for systems-level work.
• Experience with orchestration (Apache Airflow) and transformation pipelines (dbt) in large-scale production environments.
• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

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Overview

The Logistics Foundation team is a cornerstone of Instacart’s fulfillment platform, advancing foundational systems that power earnings, pricing, routing, batching, matching, dispatch, and geospatial capabilities. Our mission is to unlock new capabilities and business impact through scalable, reliable architecture that elevates both engineers and AI agents, enabling efficient, compliant logistics at scale.

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead complex, high-visibility platform initiatives end-to-end. In this role, you will collaborate closely with cross-functional partners across Legal, Finance, Policy, Shopper, Enterprise Fulfillment, Operations, and Expansions to deliver resilient systems against hard external deadlines. You’ll join a high-impact group of approximately 15 engineers within a broader Logistics Serving and Foundation organization of about 30 engineers. This is a remote-friendly role across the U.S. and Canada, with a slight preference for candidates in the San Francisco Bay Area or Toronto.

About the Job

• Own and drive complex platform workstreams end-to-end — from engineering design docs through implementation, launch coordination, war room monitoring, and ongoing support.
• Design, build, and operate high-quality, high-throughput distributed backend services with clear SLOs, robust observability, and well-run on-call/incident response practices.
• Analyze and refine service and data architectures; propose and lead new systems that improve reliability, scalability, and operational excellence.
• Establish and champion engineering standards through rigorous design reviews, production readiness, on-call ownership, and continuous improvement of instrumentation and alerting.
• Partner with Legal, Finance, and Policy to deliver compliance-ready solutions across multiple jurisdictions and regulatory frameworks, balancing urgency with long-term maintainability.
• Drive the adoption of modern technologies and AI toolsets to accelerate development, improve quality, and increase delivery velocity; mentor peers and influence platform roadmaps.
• Contribute across critical fulfillment domains — earnings, pricing, routing, batching, matching, dispatch, and geospatial — delivering solutions that directly impact customers, shoppers, and partners.

About You

You thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments, communicate clearly with technical and non-technical partners, and take ownership to deliver durable solutions under tight deadlines.

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend software development experience delivering scalable, production systems end-to-end.
• Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Ruby, Python, or Go.
• Hands-on experience building and operating large-scale distributed backend services with defined SLOs, on-call ownership, observability, and incident response.
• Proven track record independently leading complex, cross-functional projects with high ambiguity and hard external deadlines.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including authoring technical artifacts (e.g., ERDs, design docs) and coordinating launches with non-engineering stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with compliance-sensitive systems (e.g., pay systems, SOX, GDPR, government policy/labor regulations).
• Technical experience with Ruby on Rails, Python, Golang, Postgres, Redis, and AWS.
• Experience with geospatial systems, mapping, or multi-jurisdiction rule engines.
• Familiarity with marketplace or logistics domain problems.
• Proficiency in system performance optimization, including CPU utilization, load balancing, and latency reduction.
• Experience collaborating across teams to advocate for and land platform-wide solutions.
• Skilled at leveraging AI to enhance engineering velocity and efficiency.

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Overview

The Page Builder team is part of Instacart’s Retailer Platform organization within Core Experience Engineering. We own the content infrastructure that powers every consumer-facing page at Instacart—from the storefront homepage a shopper lands on, to the digital flyer they browse, the loyalty rewards they redeem, and the seasonal campaigns that drive purchases. Our systems operate at meaningful scale: the Content Management Domain (CMD) stores, resolves, and renders 150K+ active placements across 125+ format types and serves approximately 7 million placement fetches per day at roughly 200 RPS for 100+ retail partners.

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to lead high-impact platform initiatives that accelerate every team building on Instacart’s content layer. You will architect and drive the extraction of CMD from a Ruby monolith into a dedicated Go service, design proto-first API contracts used by many partner teams, and deliver low-latency, highly reliable services with clear SLOs. You’ll also shape a new composable content architecture that replaces 125+ hardcoded placement types with a single extensible type built on React components and Liquid templates—dramatically speeding up time-to-value for enterprise retailers and internal teams.

This role is a force multiplier across Instacart. You’ll collaborate closely with Shopping/URSA, Feeds, Growth, Loyalty, and Ads to evolve CMD into a dependable, well-documented platform. You’ll help define our AI-native future by exposing Page Builder capabilities as MCP-compatible endpoints so AI agents can create, preview, QA, and publish pages end-to-end. If you thrive in fast-paced, high-ownership environments and enjoy rolling up your sleeves to solve complex, high-scale platform problems, you’ll feel right at home here. This role is open to candidates based in Canada (remote).

About the Job

• Lead the CMD service extraction: architect and drive the migration of our Content Management Domain from a Ruby monolith into a dedicated Go service using a strangler-pattern approach; design proto-first API contracts (e.g., v2/GetPlacements), implement concurrent visibility condition evaluation via goroutines, and establish formal SLOs (99.9% availability, under 30ms P90 placement fetch) for a system handling 7M daily requests across 15+ consumer surfaces.
• Design composable extensibility: replace 125+ hardcoded placement format types with a single composable type built on React components and Liquid templates to eliminate weeks of full-stack engineering per new format and unlock enterprise retailer customization at scale.
• Shape the AI-native content platform: expose Page Builder capabilities as MCP-compatible endpoints, enabling AI agents to create, preview, QA, and publish pages end-to-end; define how LLM-powered content creation, AI carousels, and agentic page management integrate with CMD.
• Drive cross-team architecture: own the technical relationship with Shopping/URSA, Feeds, Growth, Loyalty, and Ads; lead API contract design, coordinate migration sequencing, and ensure CMD evolves as a reliable, well-documented platform that other teams can confidently build on.
• Mentor and multiply the team: raise the engineering bar across Page Builder by mentoring engineers, establishing robust design patterns, and contributing to a culture where AI-assisted development is the default.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong backend engineering skills with production experience in Go, Ruby, Java, or similar systems-level languages.
• Proven track record designing and leading large-scale technical projects (e.g., service extractions, platform migrations, new system architectures consumed by multiple teams).
• Experience building and operating high-throughput, low-latency backend services (handling millions of daily requests, sub-100ms latency targets, formal SLOs).
• Experience with platform-focused API design (gRPC/Protobuf, GraphQL, or REST) consumed by downstream teams.
• Demonstrated ability to drive technical decisions across team boundaries, including leading design reviews, negotiating API contracts, and coordinating migrations.
• Experience mentoring engineers and elevating team-wide technical standards.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including authorship of technical design docs and presenting architecture to leadership and cross-functional partners.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background with content management systems, page builders, or CMS infrastructure (content modeling, placement/component resolution, template rendering).
• Hands-on Go experience, including goroutines, channels, and building high-concurrency services.
• Monolith-to-microservice migration experience using patterns like strangler fig, dual-reads, or gradual traffic shifting.
• Experience building self-serve tooling for business users (merchants, retailers, marketers) where extensibility and reliability directly impact customer revenue.
• Experience with multi-tenant platform architecture serving diverse customers with shared infrastructure.
• Familiarity with AI/LLM integration patterns: MCP (Model Context Protocol), agent-based workflows, AI-generated content pipelines, or prompt-to-UI.
• Frontend experience with React/TypeScript (helpful, not required) given our span from backend infrastructure to WYSIWYG editor tooling.
• Experience at companies with analogous products or platforms (e.g., Shopify, Contentful, Builder.io, Webflow, DoorDash, Meta, Amazon).
• Experience with Protobuf/gRPC and proto-first API design.
• Familiarity with e-commerce or marketplace platforms, including retailer needs, storefront customization, and enterprise SaaS dynamics.

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Overview

This role challenges traditional approaches to digital shopping by improving backend systems that power a seamless user journey. You will lead efforts to enhance content discoverability and purchase processes, helping to perfect the interaction between user desires and our vast product offerings.

The Senior Software Engineer will focus on enhancing the user experience by developing robust backend architectures that support advanced recommendation and personalization systems. In close collaboration with ML engineers, product teams, and data scientists, you will lead the innovation of our backend services, enabling sophisticated, data-driven features that adapt to our customers' shopping behaviors.

The Core Experience teams are dedicated to creating engaging and straightforward shopping experiences. You will be part of a team that is at the heart of product innovation, focusing on everything from the user interfaces to the underlying systems that support our web and mobile platforms. Our team’s work is guided by a data-driven methodology that ensures decisions are aligned with consumer needs, helping us move swiftly and efficiently in our development processes.

About the Job

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain high-quality backend applications.
• Lead the development of our backend system's roadmap, prioritizing scalability and reliability.
• Innovate and think creatively to develop new features that enhance our customer's shopping experiences.
• Own and lead major components of our product, ensuring they meet both internal standards and external expectations.
• Collaborate across teams to foster a unified approach to product development, facilitating consensus and driving effective outcomes.
• Responsible for the strategic planning and execution of projects you oversee, from inception to deployment and maintenance.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend development experience, with a strong record of project delivery.
• Proficiency in backend languages, such as Ruby or Go.
• A solid foundation in unit testing and problem-solving.
• Exceptional communication skills and the ability to lead and collaborate with diverse teams.
• Holds a Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Effectively lead a cross-functional team, demonstrating strong teamwork skills, and capable of clearly communicating ideas and fostering alignment across different departments.
• Experience in building scalable solutions and architecture.
• Familiarity with ML model development and iteration.
• Thorough knowledge of developing applications using GraphQL.
• Skilled in the use of monitoring and observability tools like Datadog.
• Extensive experience with database management, particularly PostgreSQL and AWS OpenSearch.

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Overview

Are you ready to take your development skills to the next level? We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Ads team. You’ll play a critical role in the evolution of our Ads suite and help build world-class reporting solutions across various platforms, ensuring that advertisers and retailers receive timely, accurate, and actionable data insights. By working closely with Product Designers, Product Managers, Data Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, and other cross-functional partners, you’ll contribute to the advancement of our Ads suite and guarantee a seamless flow of data to our users.

The Instacart Ads team is at the forefront of refining our Ads products and supporting infrastructure, so your work will directly enhance our capability to process petabyte-scale data and deliver reports essential for billing, strategic decision-making, and partner management.

Our products are used by millions of people every year. To meet–and exceed–expectations we are rapidly improving and modernizing our ads platform, helping raise the quality bar for our products across the entire organization. Sound exciting? Keep reading.

The Ads team is a diverse group of spirited and highly-dedicated engineers focused on crafting and delivering comprehensive reporting solutions to our advertisers and retailers.

Our team thrives on dynamic challenges, and we take pride in developing and maintaining scalable and fault-tolerant metrics delivery systems. We've embraced a culture of open and candid collaboration where everyone's views matter, allowing us to continuously innovate and make substantial impact to the digital advertising industry through our work.

Our tech stack includes but is not limited to Rails, Go, DBT, Airflow, Scala, Apache Spark, Databricks, Delta Lake, Snowflake, Python and Terraform. We believe in constantly learning, growing and adopting the most efficient practices that enable us to deliver quality data services to our stakeholders. If you're a detective at heart, love solving complex problems, and are passionate about the intersection of data and technology, you'll fit right in!

Overview of the Ads teams that are currently hiring: 

• Ads Measurement & Data: Our cutting-edge data team is responsible for building scalable, reliable, and maintainable ETLs and its underlying architecture and platform. We directly support critical internal and external systems and metrics such as billing, attribution, spam detection, etc. Our non-functional requirements are achieved through streaming and batch processing using Scala-Spark, Airflow, DBT, Python, and Go. If you're interested in working cross-functionally with several key stakeholders, helping shape our data strategy, building distributed systems, and solving complex data architecture challenges in a fast-paced, high-impact environment, this could be the opportunity for you!

• Advertiser Optimization: We power Instacart’s advertising business by creating innovative solutions that maximize ad performance and deliver measurable value to our partners. Through advanced algorithms, machine learning, and a robust data ecosystem, the team helps advertisers achieve their goals while driving Instacart’s revenue growth. By fostering a cycle of success for advertisers, they play a pivotal role in the company’s overall business success.

About the Job

We believe that high-quality data is essential for any business organization, as such we are looking for a strong software engineer excited to raise our efficiency, quality and scalability bar. You will be able to have extensive ownership and the ability to help set best practices and contribute to product and infrastructure features. 

As a craft leader, you'll be responsible for contributing to the vision, strategy and development of our multi-platform reporting system that is efficient, scalable, and meets diverse user needs. You will advocate for data quality, correctness, scalability and latency standards to ensure consistency in how we enable data-driven decisions and features across the organization. 

You will also be proactive in spearheading new initiatives, coding and documenting components, writing and reviewing system design documents and partnering with other teams and functions to gather and understand our customer's requirements. You will think and plan strategically for short and long term initiatives to continue shaping our platform and products.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent proven industry experience (4+ years).
• 5+ years of experience in software engineering.
• Comprehensive understanding of distributed systems, proven experience with data processing technologies such as DBT and Airflow and common web frameworks such as Rails.
• Highly proficient with SQL, capable of writing and reviewing complex queries for data analysis and debugging.
• You can design for scale with the entire system in mind.
• Solid communicator, comfortable seeking and receiving feedback.
• Strong analytical and debugging skills.
• Strong sense of ownership working with a large codebase and diverse suite of products.
• A collaborative mindset to be able to partner with engineers, designers and PM's from multiple teams to co-create impactful solutions while supporting system contributions.
• Strong organizational skills with the ability to communicate and present ideas clearly and influence key stakeholders at the manager, director, and VP level.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior work experience in the digital advertising industry.
• Experience with big data technologies such as Spark, Hadoop, Flink, Hive or Kafka, and with both streaming and batching data pipelines.
• Proven experience with distributed system design.
• Strong general programming and algorithm skills.
• Strong attention to detail and accuracy in the implementation, keen eye for edge cases and code reviews. 
• Data driven mindset.

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Overview

The Ads DSE team builds the core capabilities that power Instacart's off-platform advertising, secure data collaboration (cleanrooms), automated taxonomy management, and their associated platform foundations. We are hiring a Senior Engineer II (L6) to co-own the technical roadmap, modernize our data solutions infrastructure, scale off-platform integrations and measurement capabilities, extend our cleanroom collaboration capabilities, and automate taxonomy change management workflows. This role is pivotal for cross-team collaboration, developer productivity, and AI-driven development initiatives.

You are a senior technical leader who designs and ships scalable, data‑intensive systems; drives cross‑team execution; and raises engineering standards. You’ll partner closely with Product, Data Science, Data Platform, and Governance teams to build reusable abstractions and deliver high‑impact features across our pillars: Off‑platform, Data collaboration (cleanrooms), Ads Taxonomy, Platform, and New Initiatives (AI). You will mentor L4/L5 engineers, act as an IC tech lead (no direct reports), and help define a future on‑call model and SLOs.

About the Job

• Technical leadership and roadmap
• Lead architecture for reusable, scalable systems across off‑platform workflows, cleanrooms, taxonomy automation, and the Ads Data Solutions Platform.
• Evolve core abstractions, testing, CI/CD, observability, and cost efficiency; proactively drive modernization.
• Propose and drive initiatives on behalf of engineering management; align stakeholders and manage dependencies.

• Pillar execution
• Off‑platform: expand and harden integrations with external advertising platforms; design privacy-forward activation and identity workflows; reduce reliance on third-party intermediaries; and build measurement ingestion pipelines for performance signals such as reach, frequency, and conversions.
• Data collaboration (cleanrooms): extend our cleanroom orchestration and governance tooling (multi-cleanroom support, policy enforcement), develop reusable query templates and partner configurations, optimize pipelines for cost and performance, and scale secure data collaboration deployment and management.
• Ads Taxonomy: lead intake automation (UI + backend) and release workflow improvements to reduce manual effort and cycle time.
• Platform: assist with platform modernization and developer tooling improvements; contribute to an on‑call/SLO strategy as we mature operations.
• AI‑first engineering
• Use AI‑assisted tools daily for design, coding, tests, and docs; define team prompt patterns and workflows; identify AI opportunities in internal tools and ops.
• Product quality, privacy, and security
• Translate ambiguous requirements into pragmatic phases (POC, pilot, production) with clear SLAs/SLOs.
• Champion security‑by‑design, data governance, and privacy compliance (e.g., GDPR/CCPA) across pipelines.

• Mentorship and collaboration
• Mentor engineers up to L5; set code quality and review standards.
• Build cross‑team partnerships (Ads Manager, Measurement Science, Data Platform, Privacy/Legal, and external platforms).

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• Proven senior‑level impact
• 8+ years of software engineering experience (typically 10+ for this level) delivering and operating large‑scale backend/data systems; led cross‑team projects and architectural decisions.
• Backend and data engineering
• Strong in Python and one of Ruby or Go; services/APIs (REST/gRPC); integrations with third‑party APIs (e.g., Meta, Google, The Trade Desk).
• Data pipelines with DBT and Airflow; Spark/Databricks; advanced SQL and performance tuning.
• Snowflake and AWS experience; cost‑aware design; workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal) and event‑driven patterns.
• Ads/cleanrooms/privacy
• Experience with ad‑tech/programmatic and measurement integrations; cleanrooms (Snowflake DCR, shares/listings); identity/matching (UID2, RampID) and deconfliction.
• Working knowledge of privacy and compliance practices (GDPR/CCPA) in data workflows.
• Platform excellence
• CI/CD, containers, test strategy; observability (metrics/logs/tracing) with tools like Datadog; incident readiness and SLO thinking.
• AI fluency (must‑have)
• Demonstrated, recent hands-on use of AI‑assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, OpenAI‑based assistants) to improve speed and quality.
• Experience defining reusable prompts/workflows for team use and contributing to AI‑enabled internal tools or automation.
• Ability to evaluate when to apply AI vs. deterministic systems; familiarity with evaluation, guardrails, and security/privacy implications in AI usage.
• Collaboration and communication
• Clear technical writing; stakeholder management; ability to drive consensus and unblock execution.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience with UID2/TTD integrations, Roku/Pubmatic/NBCU, or Meta Advanced Analytics/Google ADH pipelines.
• Catalog/taxonomy, entity lineage, or custom hierarchy systems.
• Snowflake governance patterns, partner data collaboration at scale.
• Vendor/partner management and external API certification programs.
• Building AI‑powered internal tools (e.g., Slackbots, data assistants).

Why this role is a great opportunity....

• Lead foundational, high‑visibility initiatives and translate them into measurable impact on revenue, efficiency, and partner adoption.
• Co‑own the technical roadmap with scope to define abstractions, standards, and AI‑first workflows across multiple pillars.
• Ship impactful features end‑to‑end: direct UID2 activation, Share Manager extensions, taxonomy intake automation, and platform modernization.
• Collaborate with strong cross‑functional partners and enjoy occasional trips to our Toronto office to connect with the broader engineering community.
• Help define our future on‑call model and operational excellence standards as we scale.

Overview

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will play a key role in shaping and advancing a robust data platform that addresses strategic challenges within Ads and across Instacart. You will design and build systems that capture and enforce data compliance requirements while enhancing self-service capabilities for internal consumers, all while maintaining strong guarantees around data integrity and consistency. By consolidating diverse requirements and collaborating across multiple engineering teams, you will help drive the platform’s north-star vision, ensuring strategic alignment and continuous delivery.

You will be part of a dynamic team focused on transforming raw data into actionable insights for a wide range of stakeholders, including advertisers, data scientists, machine learning engineers, and sales teams. The team owns and operates critical systems such as metrics transformation and storage, billing, spam detection, and lift testing, supporting multiple facets of Instacart’s data infrastructure. Through this work, you will empower teams across the organization to make data-driven decisions and directly contribute to achieving key business outcomes.

About the Job

• Lead and break down complex problems while keeping the broader data vision in focus.
• Collaborate with engineers and engineering teams, providing mentorship and fostering a strong engineering culture.
• Directly contribute to our data vision and engineering architecture. Produce and review technical artifacts that align with business goals.
• Oversee engineering initiatives end-to-end, proactively managing risks, setting goals, and ensuring smooth execution and delivery.
• Balance maintainability with tech debt and the development of new features.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience.
• Proven ability to work with multiple stakeholders and manage ambiguity and conflicting requirements.
• Self-motivated with a strong sense of ownership in a fast-paced startup environment.
• Expertise in Spark, ETLs, Distributed System architecture, MapReduce, SQL, and Big Data infrastructure.
• Experience in balancing urgency and pragmatism with high-quality, long-term solutions.

Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience
• Strong background in Scala and functional programming.
• Familiarity with Snowflake, Databricks, DBT, Airflow, Python, Terraform, and Go.