Senior Software Engineer II
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. 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.

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.
About the Job

• Own a multi-quarter integration workstream end to end — for example, unified customer identity across FoodStorm and Storefront Pro, international storefront and search expansion for enterprise retailers, or consolidation of bespoke retailer-vertical services onto shared Instacart platform rails — from problem framing through design, implementation, rollout, and deprecation of legacy paths.
• Drive the technical direction for your area: write the ERDs, propose the options, make and defend the trade-off calls, and bring partner teams along through design reviews and written artifacts that read clearly for first-time readers.
• Lead vendor and cross-team integrations where Instacart will eventually own the system — push for the right observability, fallback behavior, and cost/latency guardrails up front, and challenge partner designs early rather than inheriting them at handoff.
• Build reusable patterns, frameworks, and templates that other engineers across Enterprise Foundations and adjacent teams adopt with minimal hand-holding; treat "system at a glance" docs and migration runbooks as first-class deliverables.
• Operate hands-on as a senior individual contributor on the highest-leverage technical work in your area; raise the bar on design quality, code quality, observability, and operational rigor.
• Mentor more junior engineers in your area, delegate well-defined implementation pieces while retaining overall technical ownership, and act as a credible technical peer to senior and staff engineers in adjacent organizations.

About You
Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend software engineering experience, with a track record of owning complex, multi-quarter projects end to end as a senior individual contributor.
• Demonstrated ability to act as the technical DRI for cross-team workstreams — framing problems proactively, proposing options with clear recommendations, identifying risks early, and driving execution through to adoption.
• Experience designing and shipping distributed systems and integrations that span multiple services, teams, or external partners in a production environment with real customers.
• Strong proficiency with backend technologies in production environments (e.g., Ruby/Rails, Python, Go, or similar), along with relational databases, distributed data systems, and cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS or GCP).
• Track record of producing durable technical artifacts — ERDs, design docs, runbooks, and reusable patterns — that other engineers can build on without ongoing direct support.
• Demonstrated ability to operate in ambiguous, high-growth environments where partner roadmaps and integration commitments are still maturing, with a record of driving clarity and forward motion through that ambiguity.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct domain experience in commerce platforms, omnichannel retail, OMS, POS, catering systems, or connected-store / in-store technology.
• Experience with customer identity, account linking, or SSO integrations across multiple consumer-facing surfaces.
• Experience building or scaling search, retrieval, or ranking systems, including integrations with third-party search providers.
• Background working on international expansion — localization, data residency, multi-region infrastructure, or in-country compliance requirements.
• Experience leading vendor or partner-owned integrations where the system is ultimately operated and owned by the integrating team.
• Experience designing per-tenant configuration, isolation, and extensibility for multi-tenant enterprise platforms.

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 —$242,500 USD WA $220,000 —$232,000 USD OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI $211,000 —$222,500 USD All other states $192,000 —$202,500 USD