Senior Software Engineer, Commerce Platform

Remote - US Full Time Senior
$159K - $213K Yearly

Published on June 24, 2024

We provide the ingredients & inspiration for you to shape the career that nourishes you. Our team is building innovative solutions to never-before-solved business, technical, logistical, service, and creative challenges. If you're ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.

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
As we evolve to build a world class platform we are looking for highly skilled and motivated engineers to join our team. The role is half Cloud Service architecture, half expert mastery of e-commerce business logic; it's a unique opportunity to design the next generation of Instacart's foundational platform and help drive our exponential growth. You'll ensure millions of orders, millions of credit card transactions, and tens of millions of line-item invoice calculations are completed reliably, scalably, and touch-free daily.
ABOUT THE TEAM
Our Platform team plays a pivotal role in driving innovation and scalability within Instacart's core e-commerce capabilities, including pricing, discounting, orders, invoicing, and loyalty. By focusing on shared services and infrastructure, the team accelerates value creation for multiple product and feature teams. We recognize the significance of building robust foundations that enable efficient scaling to new business lines and use cases. Joining our team means being at the forefront of shaping the future of online grocery shopping, where your contributions will directly impact millions of customers and partners worldwide.
ABOUT THE JOB
  • We work in small teams with significant ownership and autonomy over your project
  • You’ll be working across teams, solving big problems at an organizational level that changes how Instacart operates
  • Design, implement, and ship high-quality features with a strong sense of urgency and accountability
  • Work closely with product managers, designers, data scientists, and peer engineering teams to define project requirements and execution plans
  • Ensure that system designs including APIs, deployment architecture, and dependency selection result in highly scalable, robust solutions that minimize support costs and improve an outstanding customer experience
  • Contribute broadly to Instacart’s success by exercising your freedom to suggest and drive organization-wide initiatives
ABOUT YOU
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS
  • 5+ years of software development experience
  • A strong sense of ownership
  • Self-motivation and enjoyment of a startup environment
  • Solid understanding of common back-end Web technologies in a production environment
  • An ability to balance priorities with shipping high-quality and pragmatic solutions
  • Experience working with a large codebase shared with multi-functional teams.
  • Strong knowledge of SQL
  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, or equivalent work experience
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
Do you have exceptional experience with, skills for, or just interest in any of the following software engineering areas? We are looking for someone who has a good mix of the following traits:
  • Expertise in invoicing and billing processes within an e-commerce environment. This includes being familiar with customer invoices, resolving discrepancies, and managing invoicing cycles. Familiarity with relevant invoicing regulations and tax requirements is beneficial.
  • Experience with order management systems (OMS) or eCommerce platforms that handle the end-to-end order lifecycle.  Understanding of the overall eCommerce operations and processes involved in managing customer orders, from the point of placing an order to delivery
  • In-depth understanding of various payment systems and methods used in eCommerce, including credit/debit cards, digital wallets, mobile payments, and alternative payment solutions. Familiarity with payment gateways and payment service providers (PSPs) is also valuable
  • Experience in eCommerce discounting, including a solid understanding of discount strategies and promotional campaigns. Good knowledge of pricing strategies, discount structures and ability to analyze the financial impact of different discount scenarios and make data-driven decisions.
  • Experimentation frameworks and data driven approach to development
Instacart's technology is constantly evolving and adapting. Some of the technologies you would use in our teams at Instacart include:
  • Ruby on Rails framework using Sorbet for strong-typing
  • Client-facing flexible APIs exposed via GraphQL
  • Postgres and Snowflake backend relational data stores
  • Temporal workflow 
  • Async durable event handling infrastructure including async RPC via AWS SNS/SQS, RabbitMQ
  • Caching and durable job dispatching using Memcached and Redis
  • Auto-scaling elastic service deployments built on AWS ECS, ALBs, and supporting cloud services
  • Rich monitoring and alerting infrastructure built on AWS Cloud Watch, DataDog, Sentry, OpsGenie, and supporting services
  • Any new integrations you will research, propose, implement, and deploy!
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
$192,000—$213,000 USD
WA
$184,000—$204,000 USD
OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI
$176,000—$196,000 USD
All other states
$159,000—$177,000 USD