Staff Software Engineer, Home & Cross-Retailer Search

Instacart

. Define and drive the multi-year technical vision for Home and Cross-Retailer Search infrastructure, spanning retrieval, ranking, indexing, and personalization at scale.

Posted 5/7/2026full-timeRemote • California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $221,000 - $279,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Distributed SystemsGoJavaPythonRuby

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Define and drive the multi-year technical vision for Home and Cross-Retailer Search infrastructure, spanning retrieval, ranking, indexing, and personalization at scale.
Own the architecture of Instacart's cross-retailer search platform, ensuring correctness, freshness, and low latency as catalog and query volume grows.
Own Home feed ranking and content strategy, retailer selection, and personalized recommendations driven by real-time and batch ML signals.
Partner with ML Platform and Applied Science to productionize ranking models and improve experimentation infrastructure - A/B testing, interleaving, and offline eval
Accelerate developer velocity across the sub-pillar: reduce time-to-production, build reusable components, and make it easy for product teams to experiment with minimal platform friction.
Set the technical bar through design reviews, reliability standards, latency budgets, and observability practices.
Lead major cross-org initiatives end-to-end, from scoping through rollout and post-launch ownership.
Represent the engineering perspective in product and business planning, translating ambiguous problems into well-scoped technical strategies with clear tradeoffs.
Mentor and grow engineers across Home and XRS teams.

Requirements

What you’ll need

10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of leading large-scale distributed systems in production
Demonstrated experience as a technical lead or architect on cross-team, multi-quarter initiatives driving alignment, making hard tradeoffs, and delivering results
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.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits
Eligible for a new hire equity grant and annual refresh grants.

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

software engineeringbackend systemshigh-throughput APIsdata pipelinescaching strategiesstorage systemssearch systemsrecommendations systemsfeed-ranking systemssystem design principles

Soft Skills

technical leadcommunication skillsmentoringalignmentproblem-solvingdesign reviewscross-org initiativestechnical strategy

Certifications

BS in Computer ScienceMS in Computer Science