Staff Software Engineer, Orders Platform @Instacart

Overview

The Commerce Platform organization at 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.

Key Responsibilities

• 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 event-driven, idempotent workflows for core order flows such as creation, updates, cancellations, substitutions, payments, and refunds.
• Partner with engineering and cross-functional teams across Payments, Fulfillment, Catalog, Ads, Fraud and Identity, Data, and Infrastructure to deliver durable platform capabilities.
• Modernize and extend the platform with improved consistency models, multi-tenant abstractions, and secure integrations.
• Design 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.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience designing, developing, and operating large-scale backend or platform systems in production environments.
• 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 performance tuning and incident management.
• Strong communication skills with experience partnering effectively with senior engineers and cross-functional stakeholders.

Benefits

Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location. This role is remote and eligible for equity grants.

Location

Remote, United States

How to Apply

To apply, please visit the Instacart careers page.

Deadline

No specific deadline mentioned.