About the role

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 Home & Cross-Retailer Search teams are responsible for how customers first discover where and what to shop: from the personalized Home experience to search across thousands of retailers and items. We own the systems that decide which retailers, items, and content to show, how fast they appear, and how well they match customer intent across platforms.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Home & Cross-Retailer Search team, you will sit at the intersection of retrieval, distributed systems, and machine learning building the infrastructure that determines what tens of millions of Instacart customers see, find, and buy every day.

About the Job

Define and drive the multi-year technical vision for Home and Cross-Retailer Search infrastructure, spanning retrieval, ranking, indexing, and personalization at scale.
Own the architecture of Instacart's cross-retailer search platform, ensuring correctness, freshness, and low latency as catalog and query volume grows.
Own Home feed ranking and content strategy, retailer selection, and personalized recommendations driven by real-time and batch ML signals.
Partner with ML Platform and Applied Science to productionize ranking models and improve experimentation infrastructure - A/B testing, interleaving, and offline eval
Accelerate developer velocity across the sub-pillar: reduce time-to-production, build reusable components, and make it easy for product teams to experiment with minimal platform friction.
Set the technical bar through design reviews, reliability standards, latency budgets, and observability practices.
Lead major cross-org initiatives end-to-end, from scoping through rollout and post-launch ownership.
Represent the engineering perspective in product and business planning, translating ambiguous problems into well-scoped technical strategies with clear tradeoffs
Mentor and grow engineers across Home and XRS teams.

We're looking for someone energized by operating at this intersection - comfortable making hard tradeoffs, and able to influence technical strategy across organizational boundaries.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of leading large-scale distributed systems in production
Demonstrated experience as a technical lead or architect on cross-team, multi-quarter initiatives driving alignment, making hard tradeoffs, and delivering results
Deep expertise in backend systems: high-throughput APIs, data pipelines, caching strategies, and storage systems.
Experience building or scaling search, recommendations, or feed-ranking systems at significant traffic volume
Strong command of system design principles: reliability, fault tolerance, observability, graceful degradation
Proficiency in one or more of: Ruby, Go, Python, Java, or similar backend languages; comfort across the stack to debug and contribute where needed
Strong communication skills - able to write crisp technical documents and drive alignment across engineering, product, and business stakeholders
BS/MS in Computer Science, a related field.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience at a marketplace or e-commerce platform with complex catalog, inventory, or fulfillment constraints
Familiarity with ML serving infrastructure, feature stores, and online/offline evaluation frameworks
Experience with real-time data pipelines (Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming) and search indexing at scale (Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch)
Track record of improving developer productivity and platform health: reducing p99 latency, improving cost efficiency and cutting incident rates.
Prior work on personalization systems using collaborative filtering, contextual bandits, or session-based signals

#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—$279,000 USD

$254,000—$268,000 USD

OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI

$243,000—$256,000 USD

All other states

$221,000—$233,000 USD

Skills & Tags

python java go machine learning ai backend data product

Aplyr's read

Instacart revolutionizes grocery shopping with its online delivery service, attracting innovative tech and operations professionals who thrive in a fast-paced environment.
Synthesized from recent postings & public sources

What's promising

•Instacart offers a dynamic work environment with roles in cutting-edge AI and data engineering.
•The company partners with a wide range of retailers, enhancing market reach and customer choice.
•Instacart's focus on same-day delivery meets the growing consumer demand for convenience.

What to watch

•Instacart faces intense competition from other grocery delivery services and retail giants.
•The company's reliance on gig workers raises concerns about labor practices and worker satisfaction.
•Profitability remains a challenge in the low-margin grocery delivery industry.

Why Instacart

•Instacart's integration with local retailers provides a personalized shopping experience.
•The company is at the forefront of AI-driven grocery solutions, enhancing operational efficiency.
•Instacart's Caper acquisition highlights its commitment to innovative in-store technology.

Aplyr’s read is generated by AI from public sources. Was it useful?

About Instacart

Instacart

instacart.com

View company

Instacart is an American grocery delivery and pick-up service that partners with various retailers to provide customers with a convenient way to shop for groceries online. By offering same-day delivery and pick-up options, Instacart has transformed the grocery shopping experience, making it easier for consumers to access their favorite products from local stores.