Senior Software Engineer II, Core Experience

Senior Software Engineer II, AI Labs & Foundations

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 Join Instacart's mission to transform grocery shopping through frontier AI. As a Senior Software Engineer on AI Labs & Foundations, you will design, build, and operate the high-scale production systems that power our most ambitious AI experiences—from Cart Assistant, our conversational shopping agent, to voice AI interactions and beyond. This is a high-impact opportunity to work at the intersection of robust software engineering and cutting-edge production AI/ML, directly shaping products used by millions of customers every day. We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer who will participate in the design and delivery of production AI systems, identify high-leverage technical opportunities, and contribute hands-on to AI-native products across Instacart's platform. We value bottom-up ideas, high engineering quality, and close partnership with Product, Data Science, ML, and Infrastructure teams. If you enjoy inventing, navigating ambiguity, prototyping fast, and turning wild ideas into real, scalable products, this is the team for you. AI Labs & Foundations sits at the intersection of frontier AI research and production engineering. Our portfolio spans the full stack of AI innovation at Instacart, including building and launching Cart Assistant, pioneering voice AI interactions, and constructing the foundational systems that power these cutting-edge experiences. We are a fast-moving, collaborative team that thrives on 0-to-1 thinking, shares learnings openly, and ships with urgency by prototyping fast and testing rigorously. ABOUT THE JOB * Design, build, and operate production AI-powered systems and agentic experiences (including Cart Assistant and voice AI) that directly impact how millions of customers shop. * Build foundational systems for cutting-edge AI experiences, ranging from embedding infrastructure and voice AI pipelines, to client facing components and integrations, by prototyping bold ideas and productizing what works. * Integrate foundation models via APIs and open-source frameworks; apply techniques like retrieval-augmented generation and vector search where appropriate. * Own projects end-to-end: requirements, technical design, implementation, testing, deployment, observability, and iterative improvement focused on reliability, latency, and cost efficiency. * Collaborate with cross-functional partners in product, design, data science, and infrastructure to ship AI features end-to-end. * Drive engineering excellence, including thoughtful system design, rigorous code review, and technical leadership that includes defining and promoting best practices for AI/ML production engineering across the team. ABOUT YOU Minimum Qualifications: * Proven senior software engineer who has built, shipped, and operated production systems at scale. You make architectural calls, own what you build, and deliver through ambiguity. * Hands-on experience with AI or ML in production. You've shipped LLM-powered features or integrated foundation model APIs into a live product, demonstrating the necessary expertise at the intersection of robust software engineering and deep production ML. * Experience owning services end-to-end, including CI/CD, automated testing, observability (logging, metrics, tracing), and on-call participation. * Strong communicator who partners well across disciplines - you want to get to the right answer, not just defend the first one. * Excitement and ability to leverage cutting-edge development tools, including AI assistance (e.g., Copilot, Cursor, Claude), to maximize velocity. Preferred Qualifications: * 5 to 8+ years of industry experience. * A track record of 0-to-1 work taking unconventional ideas from prototype through rapid iteration to production. * Experience building conversational agents, multi-turn dialogue systems, or agentic LLM applications. * Experience with STT/TTS or natural language interfaces, LLM fine tuning, ML transfer learning, model training and the vocabulary of measurement of model performance. * Experience with embedding systems, vector search, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, or Elasticsearch). * Experience with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP), containers (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes). * Experience with event-driven or distributed systems (e.g., Kafka). * 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. 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. CA, NY, CT, NJ $230,000—$242,000 USD WA $220,000—$232,000 USD OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI $211,000—$222,000 USD All other states $192,000—$202,000 USD

Senior Software Engineer II, Logistic Foundation

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 Logistics Foundation team is a cornerstone of Instacart’s fulfillment platform, advancing foundational systems that power earnings, pricing, routing, batching, matching, dispatch, and geospatial capabilities. Our mission is to unlock new capabilities and business impact through scalable, reliable architecture that elevates both engineers and AI agents, enabling efficient, compliant logistics at scale. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead complex, high-visibility platform initiatives end-to-end. In this role, you will collaborate closely with cross-functional partners across Legal, Finance, Policy, Shopper, Enterprise Fulfillment, Operations, and Expansions to deliver resilient systems against hard external deadlines. You’ll join a high-impact group of approximately 15 engineers within a broader Logistics Serving and Foundation organization of about 30 engineers. This is a remote-friendly role across the U.S. and Canada, with a slight preference for candidates in the San Francisco Bay Area or Toronto. ABOUT THE JOB * Own and drive complex platform workstreams end-to-end — from engineering design docs through implementation, launch coordination, war room monitoring, and ongoing support. * Design, build, and operate high-quality, high-throughput distributed backend services with clear SLOs, robust observability, and well-run on-call/incident response practices. * Analyze and refine service and data architectures; propose and lead new systems that improve reliability, scalability, and operational excellence. * Establish and champion engineering standards through rigorous design reviews, production readiness, on-call ownership, and continuous improvement of instrumentation and alerting. * Partner with Legal, Finance, and Policy to deliver compliance-ready solutions across multiple jurisdictions and regulatory frameworks, balancing urgency with long-term maintainability. * Drive the adoption of modern technologies and AI toolsets to accelerate development, improve quality, and increase delivery velocity; mentor peers and influence platform roadmaps. * Contribute across critical fulfillment domains — earnings, pricing, routing, batching, matching, dispatch, and geospatial — delivering solutions that directly impact customers, shoppers, and partners. ABOUT YOU You thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments, communicate clearly with technical and non-technical partners, and take ownership to deliver durable solutions under tight deadlines. MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS * 7+ years of backend software development experience delivering scalable, production systems end-to-end. * Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Ruby, Python, or Go. * Hands-on experience building and operating large-scale distributed backend services with defined SLOs, on-call ownership, observability, and incident response. * Proven track record independently leading complex, cross-functional projects with high ambiguity and hard external deadlines. * Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including authoring technical artifacts (e.g., ERDs, design docs) and coordinating launches with non-engineering stakeholders. * Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Experience with compliance-sensitive systems (e.g., pay systems, SOX, GDPR, government policy/labor regulations). * Technical experience with Ruby on Rails, Python, Golang, Postgres, Redis, and AWS. * Experience with geospatial systems, mapping, or multi-jurisdiction rule engines. * Familiarity with marketplace or logistics domain problems. * Proficiency in system performance optimization, including CPU utilization, load balancing, and latency reduction. * Experience collaborating across teams to advocate for and land platform-wide solutions. * Skilled at leveraging AI to enhance engineering velocity and efficiency. #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. CA, NY, CT, NJ $230,000—$242,000 USD WA $220,000—$232,000 USD OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI $211,000—$222,000 USD All other states $192,000—$202,000 USD

Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

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 Instacarts Data Infrastructure organization builds and operates the systems that power our company’s data ecosystem, including a modern open data lakehouse on Apache Iceberg, a multi-engine compute platform for stream and analytical workloads, and self-serve tooling that helps Product, Data Science, ML, Ads, Finance, and engineering teams move fast with data. We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Data Governance and Foundations Team. In this role, you’ll serve as a senior technical leader owning the architecture and delivery of our open lakehouse foundation, governance and access patterns, and multi-engine compute strategy—balancing today’s reliability with the next three to five years of scale, maturity, and cost efficiency. You’ll collaborate closely with engineering leadership and stakeholders across Data Science, ML Platform, Ads Infrastructure, Finance Engineering, Product Engineering, and Security. You’ll operate with a high degree of ownership in a fast-paced environment where architectural decisions have real technical and financial consequences. If you thrive on complex, high-scale challenges and roll-up-your-sleeves execution, this is a chance to shape the backbone of Instacart’s data platform. Our stack includes technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Trino, ClickHouse, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent, Airflow, dbt, Delta Lake, Scala, Python, Postgres, and AWS. You’ll join a focused team of 7 engineers that values pragmatism, clarity, and impact. ABOUT THE JOB * Translate Instacart’s data strategy (e.g., monetization, federated access, real-time) into an actionable multi-year architecture roadmap; align with leadership while evolving the platform for scale, maturity, and cost efficiency. * Own the open lakehouse foundation: define and deliver unified table formats, storage governance, and a multi-engine compute portfolio (interactive, batch, streaming) that enables portability and prevents lock-in. * Drive real-time and streaming infrastructure for critical use cases (Ads, Fraud, ML): set deployment patterns, SLAs, and operational practices that balance performance, availability, and spend. * Pioneer AI-native data infrastructure engineering by applying LLM/AI tools to the platform lifecycle—accelerating development, automation, observability, and cost optimization—and partnering to embed AI-powered capabilities into the platform. * Elevate engineering excellence: lead architecture reviews, mentor senior/staff engineers, influence hiring, and clearly communicate complex trade-offs to both technical and executive audiences to ensure cross-org alignment. ABOUT YOU MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS * 10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating data infrastructure or distributed systems at production scale. * Hands-on expertise with modern data lakehouse architectures and open table formats (e.g., Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi) and with distributed query/compute engines (e.g., Trino, Spark, ClickHouse), including performance tuning and production reliability. * Experience with event-driven and streaming infrastructure (e.g., Kafka, Flink) for real-time pipelines and serving systems. * Proven ownership of major platform transitions or migrations (build vs. buy, migration design, risk management) delivered to production. * Ability to build cost/benefit and TCO models for infrastructure investments and to drive alignment via clear architecture docs and strategy memos across multiple teams and leadership levels. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Experience designing platform-level governance controls and familiarity with compliance frameworks (e.g., SOX, CPRA, GDPR). * FinOps experience optimizing data platform spend, including managing multi-million dollar infrastructure budgets and negotiating vendor contracts. * Deep SQL proficiency and strong skills in Python or Scala for systems-level development. * Experience with orchestration (e.g., Apache Airflow) and data transformation pipelines (e.g., dbt) in large-scale production environments. * Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical 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. 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. 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