Senior Software Engineer II - Shopper Activation & Engagement

Senior Software Engineer II, Ads Data Solutions Engineering

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 Ads DSE team builds the core capabilities that power Instacart's off-platform advertising, secure data collaboration (cleanrooms), automated taxonomy management, and their associated platform foundations. We are hiring a Senior Engineer II (L6) to co-own the technical roadmap, modernize our data solutions infrastructure, scale off-platform integrations and measurement capabilities, extend our cleanroom collaboration capabilities, and automate taxonomy change management workflows. This role is pivotal for cross-team collaboration, developer productivity, and AI-driven development initiatives. You are a senior technical leader who designs and ships scalable, data‑intensive systems; drives cross‑team execution; and raises engineering standards. You’ll partner closely with Product, Data Science, Data Platform, and Governance teams to build reusable abstractions and deliver high‑impact features across our pillars: Off‑platform, Data collaboration (cleanrooms), Ads Taxonomy, Platform, and New Initiatives (AI). You will mentor L4/L5 engineers, act as an IC tech lead (no direct reports), and help define a future on‑call model and SLOs. ABOUT THE JOB * Technical leadership and roadmap * Lead architecture for reusable, scalable systems across off‑platform workflows, cleanrooms, taxonomy automation, and the Ads Data Solutions Platform. * Evolve core abstractions, testing, CI/CD, observability, and cost efficiency; proactively drive modernization. * Propose and drive initiatives on behalf of engineering management; align stakeholders and manage dependencies. * Pillar execution * Off‑platform: expand and harden integrations with external advertising platforms; design privacy-forward activation and identity workflows; reduce reliance on third-party intermediaries; and build measurement ingestion pipelines for performance signals such as reach, frequency, and conversions. * Data collaboration (cleanrooms): extend our cleanroom orchestration and governance tooling (multi-cleanroom support, policy enforcement), develop reusable query templates and partner configurations, optimize pipelines for cost and performance, and scale secure data collaboration deployment and management. * Ads Taxonomy: lead intake automation (UI + backend) and release workflow improvements to reduce manual effort and cycle time. * Platform: assist with platform modernization and developer tooling improvements; contribute to an on‑call/SLO strategy as we mature operations. * AI‑first engineering * Use AI‑assisted tools daily for design, coding, tests, and docs; define team prompt patterns and workflows; identify AI opportunities in internal tools and ops. * Product quality, privacy, and security * Translate ambiguous requirements into pragmatic phases (POC, pilot, production) with clear SLAs/SLOs. * Champion security‑by‑design, data governance, and privacy compliance (e.g., GDPR/CCPA) across pipelines. * Mentorship and collaboration * Mentor engineers up to L5; set code quality and review standards. * Build cross‑team partnerships (Ads Manager, Measurement Science, Data Platform, Privacy/Legal, and external platforms). ABOUT YOU MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS * Proven senior‑level impact * 8+ years of software engineering experience (typically 10+ for this level) delivering and operating large‑scale backend/data systems; led cross‑team projects and architectural decisions. * Backend and data engineering * Strong in Python and one of Ruby or Go; services/APIs (REST/gRPC); integrations with third‑party APIs (e.g., Meta, Google, The Trade Desk). * Data pipelines with DBT and Airflow; Spark/Databricks; advanced SQL and performance tuning. * Snowflake and AWS experience; cost‑aware design; workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal) and event‑driven patterns. * Ads/cleanrooms/privacy * Experience with ad‑tech/programmatic and measurement integrations; cleanrooms (Snowflake DCR, shares/listings); identity/matching (UID2, RampID) and deconfliction. * Working knowledge of privacy and compliance practices (GDPR/CCPA) in data workflows. * Platform excellence * CI/CD, containers, test strategy; observability (metrics/logs/tracing) with tools like Datadog; incident readiness and SLO thinking. * AI fluency (must‑have) * Demonstrated, recent hands-on use of AI‑assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, OpenAI‑based assistants) to improve speed and quality. * Experience defining reusable prompts/workflows for team use and contributing to AI‑enabled internal tools or automation. * Ability to evaluate when to apply AI vs. deterministic systems; familiarity with evaluation, guardrails, and security/privacy implications in AI usage. * Collaboration and communication * Clear technical writing; stakeholder management; ability to drive consensus and unblock execution. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Direct experience with UID2/TTD integrations, Roku/Pubmatic/NBCU, or Meta Advanced Analytics/Google ADH pipelines. * Catalog/taxonomy, entity lineage, or custom hierarchy systems. * Snowflake governance patterns, partner data collaboration at scale. * Vendor/partner management and external API certification programs. * Building AI‑powered internal tools (e.g., Slackbots, data assistants). Why this role is a great opportunity.... * Lead foundational, high‑visibility initiatives and translate them into measurable impact on revenue, efficiency, and partner adoption. * Co‑own the technical roadmap with scope to define abstractions, standards, and AI‑first workflows across multiple pillars. * Ship impactful features end‑to‑end: direct UID2 activation, Share Manager extensions, taxonomy intake automation, and platform modernization. * Collaborate with strong cross‑functional partners and enjoy occasional trips to our Toronto office to connect with the broader engineering community. * Help define our future on‑call model and operational excellence standards as we scale. #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

Senior Software Engineer II, FAI

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 Fraud, Appeasement & Identity (FAI) team protects the marketplace and everyone who depends on it—customers, shoppers, retailers, and brand partners. We build the systems that detect and prevent fraud across payments, accounts, and promotions; ensure that refunds and appeasements are fair, accurate, and resistant to abuse; and verify identity so that every transaction can be trusted. Our mission is to safeguard revenue and customer trust while keeping friction low, so the business can scale with confidence. We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to serve as a technical leader across FAI. In this role, you’ll define the technical strategy and architecture for critical trust surfaces real-time fraud detection, risk decisioning, appeasement and refund-abuse controls, and identity and account-verification workflows. You’ll partner closely with Product, Data Science and ML, Design, Fraud Operations, Legal, and external identity and risk vendors to deliver fast, safe, and scalable solutions. This is a high-impact role where your work directly influences fraud losses, customer trust, marketplace integrity, and our ability to scale sustainably while meeting regulatory and privacy standards. If you thrive in fast-moving, highly cross-functional environments and enjoy rolling up your sleeves to solve adversarial problems at scale, you’ll feel right at home here. We go far together, communicate with candor, and prioritize solutions where everyone can win. ABOUT THE JOB * Design, build, and operate significant components of FAI systems end to end—fraud detection, risk decisioning, appeasement/refund-abuse controls, and identity verification— delivering reliable, safe features as the platform scales to millions of customers and shoppers. * Contribute to the design of real-time and near-real-time risk decisioning systems that balance detection quality with customer experience, minimizing both fraud losses and false positives on good users. * Deliver business-critical trust initiatives (e.g., account-takeover prevention, payment and promo-abuse defense, appeasement-abuse controls, identity and eligibility verification), building auditable, privacy-first systems with strong observability and SLAs * Partner with Data Science and ML to productionize fraud and risk models—owning feature pipelines, model-serving infrastructure, and the feedback loops that keep detection effective against evolving adversaries. * Run large, cross-functional programs across multiple engineering and business teams; translate ambiguous, adversarial problem spaces into crisp technical plans, manage risk and dependencies, and unblock execution. * Mentor and develop engineers through design reviews, high-quality code practices, and clear technical standards; raise the technical bar and cultivate the next generation of technical leaders on the team. * Drive AI-first patterns into how the team builds - embedding AI and agentic automation into development procedures, code review, and operational runbooks, and establishing the standards and guardrails that let the team ship faster without compromising safety. * Champion the use of AI to strengthen detection itself - applying ML and LLM-based approaches to fraud, risk, and identity signals, and building the tooling and feedback loops that keep these systems effective against evolving adversaries. * Continuously improve the reliability, latency, and cost efficiency of trust services; establish and enforce SLOs, drive incident learnings, and champion secure-by-default, AI-augmented development workflows. ABOUT YOU MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS * 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, high-traffic services, or real-time decisioning platforms. * 2+ years owning end-to-end architecture and technical strategy for a domain or product area, from design through production operations. * Experience collaborating across teams and functions to ship cross-functional work * Proficiency in one or more backend languages (e.g., Go, Java, Python) and with modern cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS or GCP) and data stores (e.g., Postgres, DynamoDB, Clickhouse, Redis). * Experience designing low-latency, high-availability systems that make automated decisions in the request path (e.g., risk scoring, rules/policy engines, or eligibility checks). * Experience designing systems involving sensitive data identity, payments, personal information, or similar with strong privacy and security best practices and auditability. * Hands-on experience applying AI and agentic automation to engineering workflows and a point of view on how to embed AI-driven patterns into how a team builds and operates. * Demonstrated mentorship and team development experience, including leveling up engineers through design guidance and rigorous code reviews. * Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Direct experience with trust & safety, fraud, risk, identity/KYC, payments, or abuse-prevention systems in a high-scale marketplace or platform. * Experience partnering with Data Science/ML to deploy and operate models in production—feature stores, real-time inference, monitoring, and retraining loops. * Experience partnering with Legal/Policy on compliance-related work and navigating evolving regulatory requirements; familiarity with audit trails and policy engines. * Background in evaluating, integrating, and managing third-party identity, payments, or risk vendors; establishing technical SLAs; and executing zero-downtime migrations and fallback strategies. * Experience with experimentation platforms and analytics to measure detection quality, false-positive rates, and impact on customer experience. * Experience in marketplace, logistics, fintech, rideshare, or gig-economy environments. #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, 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