Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience

Senior Software Engineer, AI Productivity

Instacart

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 Instacart’s AI Productivity team builds AI-powered platforms and tools that help our engineers and operators move faster, reduce toil, and deliver higher-quality experiences for customers, shoppers, retailers, and brand partners. As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you will design, build, and operate production systems that bring large language models and intelligent automation into everyday workflows across Instacart. You’ll partner closely with product, developer platform, ML platform, security, and data teams to ship reliable, secure, and measurable solutions that improve developer velocity and operational efficiency. You’ll join a collaborative group of approximately 10 engineers who value ownership, iteration, and pragmatic problem solving. If you enjoy rolling up your sleeves, navigating ambiguity, and turning cutting-edge AI into real, scalable products, this role is for you. This position is remote-friendly across Canada. ABOUT THE JOB * Design, build, and operate AI-powered services and internal applications—such as code and test assistants, knowledge search, and intelligent chat workflows—that improve developer and operator productivity at scale. * Implement robust back-end services in languages such as Python, Go, or Java; integrate foundation models via APIs and open-source frameworks; and apply techniques like retrieval-augmented generation and vector search where appropriate. * Own projects end-to-end, including requirements, technical design, implementation, testing, deployment, observability, on-call participation, and iterative improvements focused on reliability, latency, and cost efficiency. * Partner with Developer Platform, ML Platform, Security, and Legal to ensure safe and compliant AI usage, including data governance, guardrails, content/prompt safety, and privacy-by-design. * Define and track success with clear metrics (e.g., adoption, task completion time, DORA/SPACE signals, satisfaction), and run experiments and A/B tests to validate impact and guide iteration. * Create and maintain shared tooling, libraries, and documentation that raise the bar for applied AI development across Instacart, and mentor teammates on best practices in this fast-paced, evolving space. ABOUT YOU MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS * 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production services. * 3+ years of hands-on experience in at least one of: Python, Go, or Java. * 2+ years of experience integrating ML or LLM capabilities into applications (e.g., via OpenAI, Anthropic, or open-source frameworks such as LangChain or LlamaIndex) and shipping them to production. * Practical experience with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP), containers (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes). * Proficiency with SQL and data modeling; experience building or maintaining data pipelines (e.g., Airflow, Dagster, or similar). * Experience owning services end-to-end, including CI/CD, automated testing, observability (logging, metrics, tracing), and participation in an on-call rotation. * Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Experience adapting or fine-tuning foundation models and implementing retrieval-augmented generation with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, or Elasticsearch with vector search). * Track record of building internal developer tools or platforms adopted by 100+ engineers. * Experience measuring developer productivity (e.g., DORA/SPACE), instrumenting product analytics, and running A/B or multivariate experiments. * Knowledge of AI safety, privacy, and compliance practices (e.g., PII redaction, guardrails, model/content moderation, data residency considerations). * Experience with event-driven systems and microservices (e.g., Kafka, Pub/Sub) and designing resilient distributed systems. * Ability to build lightweight front-ends for internal tools (e.g., React, TypeScript) to accelerate adoption and feedback loops. * Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership within cross-functional teams. #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. CAN $168,000—$177,500 USD

Senior Software Engineer I — Agentic Analytics

Instacart

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 ABOUT THE ROLE We are currently seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Agentic Analytics Platform team — the team responsible for the AI-for-Data charter inside Instacart's Data Infrastructure org. You'll design and build LLM-powered systems that transform how data practitioners (data scientists, data engineers, analysts, PMs) interact with data at Instacart — from natural-language data access and AI-assisted SQL, to automated metadata generation, to embedding intelligent capabilities across our broader data infra ecosystem. This is a hands-on role at the frontier of applied AI inside a large, modern data stack. ABOUT THE TEAM The mission of the Instacart Self-Serve organization is to improve the productivity of data practitioners through easy-to-use, self-serve tools. Agentic Analytics is the team chartered with bringing AI and LLMs into that mission — broadly. We own the systems, evals, and product surfaces that make AI-for-Data real at Instacart, and we partner across Data Infra to embed AI capabilities wherever they create the most leverage. It's a small team with an outsized charter, defining what "AI for the data org" looks like in production at company scale. ABOUT THE JOB * You will be part of a small, ambitious team with a large amount of ownership and surface area, contributing directly to the AI-for-Data charter at Instacart. * You will build LLM-powered systems end-to-end — retrieval/grounding over internal metadata and code, agentic workflows, evals and quality systems, and the product surfaces that put these tools in front of internal users. * You will have the opportunity to suggest and drive new initiatives — the roadmap is still being shaped and there's real room for contribution. * You will collaborate closely with other engineers on the team and contribute to a strong engineering culture around applied AI rigor (evals, observability, safety, cost). * You will work closely with Data Science, ML, Product Engineering, and other Data Infra teams to identify high-leverage AI applications and translate them into reliable, production-grade systems. ABOUT YOU MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS * Self-motivation and an enjoyment for a startup environment, with comfort operating in ambiguity * A strong sense of ownership and a builder's instinct — you've shipped real systems, not just prototypes * Strong backend engineering skills in Python, with experience building production services * Hands-on experience with applied LLM systems — RAG, agentic workflows, prompt engineering, evals, or similar. You've worked on an LLM-powered system in production (or close to it) and have opinions on what makes them reliable. * Working knowledge of common data infrastructure technologies (Python, Airflow, Snowflake, dbt) in a production environment * Strong knowledge of SQL * Experience working with a large codebase on a cross-functional team * An ability to balance a sense of urgency with shipping high quality and pragmatic solutions * 5+ years of working experience in a similar field/environment PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Experience with retrieval systems, vector stores, or grounding LLMs over structured/unstructured enterprise data * Familiarity with eval frameworks and quality systems for LLM-powered products * Experience building developer tools or internal tools for technical users * Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, OR equivalent work experience #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. CAN $168,000—$177,500 USD

Senior Software Engineer II - Shopper Activation & Engagement

Instacart

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. CAN $196,000—$207,000 USD