Senior Software Engineer, Instacart

• If you're inspired by high-scale, high-impact work and want to lead in an environment that values strong design, collaboration, innovation, and clear communication, we’d love to chat
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or similar
• 5+ years of backend engineering experience in high-scale, distributed environments
• Proficient in backend languages (e.g., Ruby, Go, Java)
• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.), caching (Redis, Memcached), and distributed systems
• Comfortable navigating complex business and technical domains, especially payments, invoicing, billing, or compliance-heavy environments
• Strong communicator who can lead projects and drive alignment across stakeholders
• High sense of ownership, capable of working independently, influencing team direction, and mentoring others
• Strong background in operational excellence: monitoring, alerting, and incident response
• Hands-on experience driving experimentation and A/B testing when launching new features, with a data-driven approach to measuring and iterating on outcomes

Desirable

• We're seeking an experienced, impact-driven Senior Software Engineer II to join Instacart's Payments team—a business-critical pillar of our Platform
• Processing over $100M every day, Payments operates at the intersection of high performance, regulatory complexity, and rapid innovation
• We build reliable, accurate, and scalable systems that power every Instacart transaction
• As a technical leader in Payments, you’ll tackle some of Instacart’s most challenging and rewarding problems: optimizing payment costs, improving payment success rates, launching new payment methods, ensuring accounting precision, and architecting robust integrations with external partners
• You’ll collaborate closely with various cross functional, external, and other engineering partners to deliver seamless and secure payment experiences for all users
• Our team values agility and thrives on change. We move fast to adapt to evolving business priorities and consistently deliver at a high bar
• You’ll help shape the future of our payments platform, mentor talented engineers, and foster a culture centered on ownership, operational excellence, and continuous improvement
• Design, develop, and maintain robust, scalable, and highly available backend systems for payment processing
• Implement payment-related APIs and services, ensuring security, reliability, and accuracy at every step of the payment lifecycle
• Lead technical projects that span multiple teams, from initial design to execution and continuous improvement
• Integrate with external payment processors, gateways, wallets, and financial partners while ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements
• Optimize systems for cost, performance, observability, and operational efficiency
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners across legal, product, data science, finance, operations, and more
• Proactively drive platform improvements and initiatives that impact key business metrics
• Mentor and support fellow engineers, establish best practices, and uphold high standards for code quality and architecture