Staff Software Engineer, Orders Platform

Role Description

The Commerce Platform organization at Instacart is seeking an experienced Staff Software Engineer to lead foundational platform initiatives on the Orders Platform team. The Orders platform is the orchestration layer for commerce at Instacart, coordinating the end-to-end lifecycle of every order across customers, shoppers, retailers, payments, fulfillment systems, and partner integrations at scale.

• Help define and drive the architectural strategy for systems that support hundreds of millions of transactions each year.
• Work on the reliability, correctness, scalability, and auditability of order workflows across diverse use cases and fulfillment models.
• Unlock new experiences for customers, shoppers, retailers, and partners.
• Lead multi-team initiatives that improve the reliability, scalability, and correctness of the Orders platform across checkout, payments, fulfillment, post-order workflows, and partner integrations.
• Define and drive the technical strategy for the order lifecycle, including modeling and evolving order state machines, guarantees, and service contracts.
• Architect and evolve event-driven, idempotent workflows for core order flows such as creation, updates, cancellations, substitutions, payments, and refunds.
• Partner closely with engineering and cross-functional teams across Payments, Fulfillment, Catalog, Ads, Fraud and Identity, Data, and Infrastructure.
• Modernize and extend the platform through improved consistency models, multi-tenant abstractions, stronger failure isolation, and secure integrations.
• Design platform capabilities that support agentic commerce, including policy-driven automated workflows, secure APIs, and well-defined tools.
• Raise the technical bar by leading design reviews, coaching engineers, and contributing hands-on to critical code paths.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience designing, developing, and operating large-scale backend or platform systems in production environments.
• Proven experience leading complex, cross-functional technical initiatives end to end.
• Strong foundation in distributed systems, service-oriented architectures, and high-volume APIs.
• Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages such as Go, Java, or Python.
• Production experience with relational and NoSQL data stores.
• Experience operating mission-critical services, including on-call ownership and performance tuning.
• Demonstrated experience using AI-assisted development tools.
• Strong communication skills with experience partnering effectively with senior engineers and cross-functional stakeholders.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience building payments, orders, logistics, or other high-integrity transactional platforms.
• Deep expertise with asynchronous workflows and event-driven architectures such as Kafka or Pub/Sub.
• Experience integrating with diverse internal services and external partners.
• Success building or evolving multi-tenant, extensible platforms.
• Strong observability and reliability engineering practices.
• Experience with secure-by-default service design.
• Interest in applying AI and agentic patterns to platform engineering work.

Benefits

• Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits.
• Remote work flexibility under the Flex First policy.
• New hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.