Senior Software Engineer II

Job description

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

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Caper Support and Tooling team, you will lead the design and development of a next‑generation tooling platform that empowers both internal teams and retailer teams to work smarter, faster, and more efficiently. You’ll drive the architecture and implementation of systems that enable intelligent demo workflows, AI‑powered insights into customer shopping behavior, automated feedback loops, and robust full‑stack data exploration tools for our retail partners.

This role combines hands‑on technical depth, end‑to‑end system ownership, product thinking, and mentorship. You’ll work closely with engineering, product, design, AI/ML experts, BD teams, and retailer partners to define and deliver high‑impact software that accelerates Caper’s growth and strengthens our ecosystem.

Caper tooling spans web applications, backend services, data infrastructure, AI‑driven insights, and tools that integrate closely with our smart cart hardware. You will help set the technical direction for these systems and build a cohesive platform that improves collaboration, increases operational efficiency, and empowers retailers with powerful data and analytics.

About the Job

• Design, build, and own robust internal tools that streamline collaboration across BD, engineering, project launch, and product teams, including an intelligent demo platform and workflow automation for the Caper smart cart experience.
• Architect end‑to‑end systems that leverage AI to analyze user behavior during shopping sessions, identify friction points, and feed insights into automated feedback loops that accelerate product and feature development.
• Develop retailer‑facing applications that provide advanced reporting, actionable analytics, and intuitive dashboards that combine software signals with hardware telemetry.
• Partner with cross‑functional teams to translate ambiguous product requirements into scalable technical solutions that significantly improve team efficiency and operational effectiveness.
• Drive technical strategy, influence roadmap decisions, and ensure system reliability, scalability, and long‑term maintainability.
• Collaborate closely with data engineering, AI/ML, and hardware teams to build unified, intelligent platforms that seamlessly bridge software and physical devices.
• Provide mentorship and guidance to engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, strong ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Take full ownership of features from design through launch, including measurement, rollout, and iterative enhancement.
• Participate in the team’s on‑call rotation, resolving issues encountered by users of the tooling platform, supporting incidents that occur during customer shopping sessions, and delivering powerful analyses to help partner teams quickly diagnose and resolve incidents.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building and maintaining large‑scale distributed systems or complex full‑stack platforms.
• Strong proficiency in at least two modern programming languages such as Python, Go, Java, Kotlin, or Typescript.
• Proven experience designing end‑to‑end systems, spanning backend services, web applications, and/or data pipelines.
• Ability to tackle highly ambiguous technical problems with strong product intuition and deep empathy for user needs.
• Hands‑on experience building data‑driven or AI‑augmented workflows, including systems that ingest, analyze, and operationalize large datasets to automate or streamline manual processes.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, design, and operations teams.
• Strong sense of ownership, with a bias toward action, high‑quality execution, and continuous iteration.
• Familiarity with leading large language models and experience building applications or systems powered by LLMs, with a track record of successfully deploying them to drive measurable business impact.
• Extensive experience working with modern cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS, including hands‑on use of cloud services to design, architect, and optimize system frameworks; able to provide strong technical guidance and best‑practice recommendations to the team.
• Experience working with intelligent hardware products such as Android‑based or Linux‑based devices, with a solid understanding of system fundamentals and the ability to investigate and diagnose issues at the system level.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building internal tooling platforms or retailer/enterprise‑facing systems.
• Familiarity with data analysis workflows, event‑based architectures, or AI‑powered features.
• Experience integrating software with hardware products.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience.
• Passion for improving developer experience, operational efficiency, and intelligent automation.
• Prior experience in retail tech, IoT, or B2B SaaS platforms.

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.

CAN

$193,000—$214,000 CAD