Staff Software Engineer, Home & Cross-Retailer Search

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California, +18 more states.

📋 Description

• Establish and lead the long-term technical vision for the Home and Cross-Retailer Search infrastructure, encompassing retrieval, ranking, indexing, and large-scale personalization.

• Oversee the architecture of Instacart's cross-retailer search platform, ensuring accuracy, timeliness, and low latency as catalog and query volumes increase.

• Manage the ranking strategy and content for the Home feed, including retailer selection and personalized recommendations driven by both real-time and batch machine learning signals.

• Collaborate with the ML Platform and Applied Science teams to implement ranking models and enhance experimentation infrastructure, including A/B testing, interleaving, and offline evaluation.

• Enhance developer productivity within the sub-pillar by reducing time-to-production, developing reusable components, and enabling product teams to experiment with minimal platform friction.

• Uphold high technical standards through design reviews, reliability benchmarks, latency expectations, and observability practices.

• Spearhead significant cross-organizational initiatives from inception to execution, including scoping, rollout, and post-launch oversight.

• Advocate for the engineering viewpoint in product and business planning, converting ambiguous challenges into well-defined technical strategies with clear trade-offs.

• Mentor and develop engineers within the Home and XRS teams.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of software engineering experience, with a proven history of leading large-scale distributed systems in a production environment.

• Proven record as a technical lead or architect on multi-team, multi-quarter projects that drive alignment, navigate difficult trade-offs, and achieve results.

• Extensive knowledge of backend systems, including high-throughput APIs, data pipelines, caching strategies, and storage solutions.

• Experience in building or scaling search, recommendation, or feed-ranking systems under significant traffic loads.

• Strong understanding of system design principles such as reliability, fault tolerance, observability, and graceful degradation.

• Proficient in one or more of the following: Ruby, Go, Python, Java, or similar backend programming languages; comfortable across the stack to debug and contribute as necessary.

• Excellent communication skills, able to produce clear technical documentation and foster alignment among engineering, product, and business stakeholders.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field.

🏝️ Benefits

• Instacart offers highly competitive compensation and benefits packages.

• Eligible for a new hire equity grant and annual refresh grants.