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Instacart is seeking an experienced Staff Software Engineer to lead foundational platform initiatives on the Orders Platform team. The Orders platform is the orchestration layer for commerce at Instacart, coordinating the end-to-end lifecycle of every order across customers, shoppers, retailers, payments, fulfillment systems, and partner integrations at scale.
In this role, you will help define and drive the architectural strategy for systems that support hundreds of millions of transactions each year. You will work on the reliability, correctness, scalability, and auditability of order workflows across diverse use cases and fulfillment models, while unlocking new experiences for customers, shoppers, retailers, and partners.
Key responsibilities include:
- Lead multi-team initiatives that improve the reliability, scalability, and correctness of the Orders platform across checkout, payments, fulfillment, post-order workflows, and partner integrations
- Define and drive the technical strategy for the order lifecycle, including modeling and evolving order state machines, guarantees, and service contracts to support new products and fulfillment models
- Architect and evolve event-driven, idempotent workflows for core order flows such as creation, updates, cancellations, substitutions, payments, and refunds
- Partner closely with engineering and cross-functional teams across Payments, Fulfillment, Catalog, Ads, Fraud and Identity, Data, and Infrastructure
- Modernize and extend the platform through capabilities such as improved consistency models, multi-tenant abstractions, stronger failure isolation, and secure integrations
- Design platform capabilities that support agentic commerce, including policy-driven automated workflows and secure APIs
- Raise the technical bar by leading design reviews, coaching engineers, and contributing hands-on to critical code paths
Required qualifications:
- 10+ years of experience designing, developing, and operating large-scale backend or platform systems in production
- Proven experience leading complex, cross-functional technical initiatives end to end
- Strong foundation in distributed systems, service-oriented architectures, and high-volume APIs
- Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages such as Go, Java, or Python
- Production experience with relational and NoSQL data stores
- Experience operating mission-critical services, including on-call ownership and incident management
- Demonstrated experience using AI-assisted development tools
- Strong communication skills with experience partnering with senior engineers and cross-functional stakeholders
Preferred qualifications include a degree in Computer Science or related field, experience building payments, orders, logistics, or other high-integrity transactional platforms, and deep expertise with asynchronous workflows and event-driven architectures such as Kafka or Pub/Sub.
