Instacart
Senior Software Engineer, Backend Platform
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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
About the Role -
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Backend Platform team, you will play a key role in ensuring that both our customer-facing services and internal tools remain reliable, perform well, and meet the needs of our users. You’ll take ownership in high-pressure situations, responding to on-call incidents, resolving issues, and improving system reliability. Your work will directly impact millions of users, helping to build a more reliable and performant platform at scale. You’ll also drive continuous improvement to make Instacart’s services even better. Additionally, you will enhance the architectural framework to increase delivery speed and facilitate swift product development. You will also implement new processes to boost operational excellence, making use of AI tools to accelerate development.
About the Team
At Instacart, the Backend Platform Site team brings together software and systems engineering to design and maintain reliable, large-scale, and distributed systems that keep everything running smoothly. Our work focuses on optimizing systems, building robust infrastructure, and automating wherever possible to reduce repetitive tasks. On this team, you’ll tackle the unique, exciting challenges of scaling systems that power millions of shoppers and customers, leveraging your skills in coding, algorithms, complexity analysis, and the design of large-scale systems. This is your chance to make a big impact at Instacart.
About the Job
Work on services through their entire life cycle, from design to deployment, operation, and improvement.Help launch services by designing systems, building platforms, planning capacity, and reviewing launches. Keep services running smoothly by monitoring availability, latency, and system performance.Improve systems using automation and updates to make them faster and more reliable.Respond to incidents efficiently to ensure services meet performance goals.
About You
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 5 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages
- 3 years of experience in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems, and 2 years of experience leading projects and providing technical leadership
- Strong proficiency in maintaining high standards for production services
- Rapid coding skills and management of high-traffic production services
- Experience with high scale throughput and distributed systems problems
Preferred Qualifications
- Skilled at navigating ambiguity and deriving insights from complex data sets
- Experience working across teams to champion platform solutions
- Visionary thinker capable of generating transformative ideas
- Expertise in leveraging AI to enhance delivery velocity and efficiency
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. Currently, we are only hiring in the following provinces: Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia.
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 Canadian based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.
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