Staff Software Engineer, Home & Cross-Retailer Search

Instacart

Posted 4mo ago

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Define and drive the multi-year technical vision for Home and Cross-Retailer Search infrastructure
Own the architecture of Instacart's cross-retailer search platform
Own Home feed ranking and content strategy, retailer selection, and personalized recommendations
Partner with ML Platform and Applied Science to productionize ranking models
Accelerate developer velocity across the sub-pillar
Set the technical bar through design reviews, reliability standards, latency budgets, and observability practices
Lead major cross-org initiatives end-to-end
Represent the engineering perspective in product and business planning
Mentor and grow engineers across Home and XRS teams

10+ years of software engineering experience
Track record of leading large-scale distributed systems in production
Demonstrated experience as a technical lead or architect on cross-team, multi-quarter initiatives
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

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)
Experience with 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

Skills