Staff Software Engineer, Orders Platform

Instacart

Posted 1mo ago

The employer’s full description could not be read from their board. This is a summary of the posting — follow the apply link for the original.

Lead multi-team initiatives improving reliability, scalability, and correctness of the Orders platform
Define and drive technical strategy for order lifecycle, state machines, and service contracts
Architect and evolve event-driven, idempotent workflows for core order flows
Partner with cross-functional teams to deliver durable platform capabilities
Modernize platform through consistency models, multi-tenant abstractions, and failure isolation
Design platform capabilities supporting agentic commerce and policy-driven automated workflows
Lead design reviews and coach engineers on technical decision-making
Contribute hands-on to critical code paths

10+ years of experience designing and operating large-scale backend or platform systems
Proven experience leading complex, cross-functional technical initiatives
Strong foundation in distributed systems and service-oriented architectures
Hands-on experience with event-driven patterns and idempotent workflows
Proficiency in Go, Java, or Python
Production experience with relational and NoSQL data stores
Experience operating mission-critical services including on-call and incident management
Demonstrated experience using AI-assisted development tools

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field
Experience building payments, orders, or logistics transactional platforms
Expertise with asynchronous workflows and event-driven architectures like Kafka or Pub/Sub
Experience integrating with internal services and external partners
Success building multi-tenant, extensible platforms
Strong observability and reliability engineering practices
Experience with secure-by-default service design and PCI/PII considerations
Interest in applying AI and agentic patterns to platform engineering

Skills