Senior Software Engineer, Instacart

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend services or distributed systems
• Proficiency in at least one of the following languages: Go, Java, Python, or Scala
• Hands-on experience designing and operating microservices on a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) using containers/orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Strong SQL skills and experience with event streaming and data stores (e.g., Kafka or Pub/Sub; Redis; PostgreSQL or MySQL)
• Proven ownership of production services, including observability (metrics, logging, tracing) and participation in an on-call rotation
• Experience delivering in an agile environment and collaborating effectively with product managers, data scientists, and cross-functional partners
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Desirable

• Instacart is building the operating system for the grocery industry, and our FAI team develops the intelligence behind how orders are promised, picked, batched, and delivered
• As a Senior Software Engineer II on FAI, you’ll join a team of 14 engineers partnering closely with product, data science, machine learning, and operations to power real-time decisions that keep our marketplace running smoothly for customers, shoppers, and retail partners
• In this role, you will design, build, and operate scalable, low-latency services and data pipelines that directly affect customer experience and business outcomes at high scale
• You’ll have significant ownership across the stack—from architecture and implementation to reliability, observability, and on-call—while collaborating across disciplines to turn ideas into production systems
• Design, build, and operate resilient, low-latency microservices and data pipelines that power fulfillment planning, inventory availability, and delivery promises
• Partner with machine learning and data science to productionize models and features, enable online experimentation, and continuously improve decision quality
• Own services end-to-end, from technical design and RFCs through implementation, rollout, observability, and participation in an on-call rotation
• Drive reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency through SLOs, capacity planning, incident reviews, and performance optimization
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Marketplace, and Operations to define roadmaps and deliver measurable customer and business impact
• Mentor other engineers via code and design reviews, pair programming, and contributions to engineering best practices and standards