The job, in the employer's words
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 Commerce Platform organization at Instacart is seeking an experienced Staff Software Engineer to lead foundational platform initiatives on the Orders Platform team. The Orders platform is the orchestration layer for commerce at Instacart, coordinating the end-to-end lifecycle of every order across customers, shoppers, retailers, payments, fulfillment systems, and partner integrations at scale.
In this role, you will help define and drive the architectural strategy for systems that support hundreds of millions of transactions each year. You will work on the reliability, correctness, scalability, and auditability of order workflows across diverse use cases and fulfillment models, while unlocking new experiences for customers, shoppers, retailers, and partners.
The Orders Platform team sits at the center of Instacart’s commerce stack, which means this role requires deep technical judgment, strong cross-functional partnership, and a willingness to solve complex problems across many domains. If you are a big-picture thinker who enjoys owning high-impact systems, leading multi-team initiatives, and building durable platforms that help teams move faster and more safely, this role is for you.
Instacart is a collaborative, fast-paced environment where engineers are encouraged to act like owners, communicate transparently, and build solutions that help the broader ecosystem succeed. You will partner with teams across Engineering, Product, Data, Infrastructure, and business functions to deliver platform capabilities that can scale with Instacart’s evolving commerce experiences.
About the Job
- Lead multi-team initiatives that improve the reliability, scalability, and correctness of the Orders platform across checkout, payments, fulfillment, post-order workflows, and partner integrations.
- Define and drive the technical strategy for the order lifecycle, including modeling and evolving order state machines, guarantees, and service contracts to support new products, fulfillment models, and surfaces while maintaining strong service expectations and data integrity.
- Architect and evolve event-driven, idempotent workflows for core order flows such as creation, updates, cancellations, substitutions, payments, and refunds, ensuring clear invariants, observability, and auditable histories across services.
- Partner closely with engineering and cross-functional teams across Payments, Fulfillment, Catalog, Ads, Fraud and Identity, Data, and Infrastructure to deliver durable platform capabilities that other product teams can build on safely and quickly.
- Modernize and extend the platform through capabilities such as improved consistency models, multi-tenant abstractions, stronger failure isolation, and secure integrations that increase flexibility and operability at scale.
- Design platform capabilities that support agentic commerce, including policy-driven automated workflows, secure APIs, and well-defined tools that make Orders safely addressable by agents and AI systems.
- Raise the technical bar by leading design reviews, coaching engineers, contributing hands-on to critical code paths, and helping teams make sound technical decisions through design spikes, launches, and cross-team efforts.
About You
Minimum Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience designing, developing, and operating large-scale backend or platform systems in production environments.
- Proven experience leading complex, cross-functional technical initiatives end to end, including architecture, implementation, rollout, and ongoing operations.
- Strong foundation in distributed systems, service-oriented architectures, and high-volume APIs, including hands-on experience with event-driven patterns and idempotent workflows.
- Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages such as Go, Java, or Python.
- Production experience with relational and NoSQL data stores.
- Experience operating mission-critical services, including on-call ownership, service-level objectives or error budgets, performance tuning, incident management, and post-incident reviews.
- Demonstrated experience using AI-assisted development tools to accelerate design exploration, implementation, code review, or code quality.
- Strong communication skills with experience partnering effectively with senior engineers, Product, and cross-functional stakeholders to align on technical direction.
Preferred Qualifications
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience building payments, orders, logistics, or other high-integrity transactional platforms, including policy-driven entitlements and consistency or availability trade-offs.
- Deep expertise with asynchronous workflows and event-driven architectures such as Kafka or Pub/Sub, including at-least-once or exactly-once processing and outbox patterns.
- Experience integrating with diverse internal services and external partners, with clear ownership of API contracts, data models, service expectations, and operational readiness.
- Success building or evolving multi-tenant, extensible platforms that enable rapid onboarding of new product flows, payment methods, incentive types, or partner integrations.
- Strong observability and reliability engineering practices, including tracing, metrics, alerting, circuit breaking, and chaos testing.
- Experience with secure-by-default service design, including tokenization, secrets management, PCI considerations, or PII considerations.
- Interest in applying AI and agentic patterns to platform engineering work in a safe, reliable, and measurable way.
#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.
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 US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.
Requirements mentioned
- 10+ years of experience designing, developing, and operating large-scale backend or platform systems in production environments.
- Proven experience leading complex, cross-functional technical initiatives end to end, including architecture, implementation, rollout, and ongoing operations.
- Strong foundation in distributed systems, service-oriented architectures, and high-volume APIs, including hands-on experience with event-driven patterns and idempotent workflows.
- Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages such as Go, Java, or Python.
- Production experience with relational and NoSQL data stores.
- Experience operating mission-critical services, including on-call ownership, service-level objectives or error budgets, performance tuning, incident management, and post-incident reviews.
- Demonstrated experience using AI-assisted development tools to accelerate design exploration, implementation, code review, or code quality.
- Strong communication skills with experience partnering effectively with senior engineers, Product, and cross-functional stakeholders to align on technical direction.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience building payments, orders, logistics, or other high-integrity transactional platforms, including policy-driven entitlements and consistency or availability trade-offs.
- Deep expertise with asynchronous workflows and event-driven architectures such as Kafka or Pub/Sub, including at-least-once or exactly-once processing and outbox patterns.
- Experience integrating with diverse internal services and external partners, with clear ownership of API contracts, data models, service expectations, and operational readiness.
- Success building or evolving multi-tenant, extensible platforms that enable rapid onboarding of new product flows, payment methods, incentive types, or partner integrations.
- Strong observability and reliability engineering practices, including tracing, metrics, alerting, circuit breaking, and chaos testing.
- Experience with secure-by-default service design, including tokenization, secrets management, PCI considerations, or PII considerations.
- Interest in applying AI and agentic patterns to platform engineering work in a safe, reliable, and measurable way.
- #LI-Remote
- CA, NY, CT, NJ
- $265,000—$279,500 USD
- WA
- $254,000—$268,000 USD
- OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI
- $243,000—$256,500 USD
- All other states
- $221,000—$233,000 USD
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