About the role
We're transforming the grocery industry
At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.
Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.
Instacart is a Flex First team
There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.
Overview
The Shopper Activation & Engagement team owns the complete shopper lifecycle—from activation and onboarding to engagement, earnings, quality and ratings, recognition, retention, and safety. Our systems directly influence marketplace health and efficiency, the shopper experience, and business continuity as we navigate evolving regulatory requirements.
As a Senior Software Engineer II on this team, you will lead strategic, high-impact engineering initiatives that shape how millions of shoppers get started, find work, and succeed on our platform. You will drive cross-team alignment, set technical direction across complex domains, and champion AI enablement to meaningfully improve developer productivity and the quality of our systems.
You will work closely with engineers across backend, mobile, and infrastructure, and partner with Product, Design, and Data Science. You’ll also collaborate with teams across Logistics, Identity & Fraud, Transaction Platform, and Mobile Foundations, plus business partners in Operations, Legal, Trust & Safety, CRM, Learning, and the Shopper Community. This role is remote within Canada.
We are a highly collaborative, outcomes-driven group that values operational excellence, transparency, and a roll-up-your-sleeves mentality. If you thrive in a fast-paced environment and enjoy solving complex problems at scale, you’ll find a meaningful home here.
About the Job
- Lead the design, architecture, and delivery of highly scalable services that power the shopper lifecycle, including onboarding, eligibility, work evaluation, earnings, ratings and quality, recognition, safety, and retention.
- Set technical direction for domain migrations and platform modernization; define patterns, interfaces, and standards that improve reliability, performance, and developer productivity across multiple services and codebases.
- Partner with Product, Design, and Data Science to shape roadmaps and success metrics; experiment, measure, and iterate to improve activation, engagement, and retention outcomes.
- Champion AI enablement across the team by building internal tooling and agentic automations that accelerate development, testing, and operations; integrate AI safely and measurably into the engineering lifecycle.
- Orchestrate complex cross-functional programs with dependencies across R&D and business partners (e.g., Logistics, Identity & Fraud, Transaction Platform, Mobile Foundations, Operations, Legal, Trust & Safety, CRM); align stakeholders and deliver under tight timelines.
- Uplevel operational excellence—observability, incident response, SLAs/SLOs, performance tuning—while mentoring engineers through design reviews, documentation, and pair programming.
About You
Minimum Qualifications
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems at scale.
- 3+ years architecting and owning distributed systems with high availability and low latency (e.g., microservices, event-driven architectures, streaming/queues).
- Proficiency in at least two of: Go, Java, Kotlin, Python; plus hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), containers/orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), and data technologies (SQL/NoSQL, Redis, Kafka or Pub/Sub).
- 2+ years leading cross-functional technical initiatives with multiple teams and external dependencies through delivery under tight deadlines.
- Hands-on experience integrating AI into the development lifecycle (e.g., code or test generation, CI/CD automation, observability or incident triage) with measurable impact on productivity and quality.
- Proven partnership with Product, Design, and Data Science to define requirements and ship user-facing features.
- Track record of mentoring engineers and elevating team practices through design reviews, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience collaborating with Legal and Compliance on projects impacted by evolving labor or marketplace regulations.
- Experience applying AI in product features to improve user experience or operational efficiency (e.g., personalization, ranking, trust & safety, support automation).
- Vendor management experience, including evaluating partners and integrating third-party platforms or SDKs.
- Mobile app or mobile-first product experience; familiarity with iOS/Android client-backend APIs, experimentation frameworks, and release cycles.
- Background in marketplaces, gig economy, logistics, or fintech/payments.
#LI-Remote
Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here. Currently, we are only hiring in the following provinces: Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia.
Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.
For Canadian based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.
