The opportunity
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…
What you'll do
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 to support new products, fulfillment models, and surfaces while maintaining strong service expectations and data integrity.
Architect and evolve event-driven, idempotent workflows for core order flows: such as creation, updates, cancellations, substitutions, payments, and refunds, ensuring clear invariants, observability, and auditable histories across services.
Partner closely with engineering and cross-functional teams across Payments,: Fulfillment, Catalog, Ads, Fraud and Identity, Data, and Infrastructure to deliver durable platform capabilities that other product teams can build on safely and quickly.
Modernize and extend the platform through capabilities such as improved: consistency models, multi-tenant abstractions, stronger failure isolation, and secure integrations that increase flexibility and operability at scale.
Design platform capabilities that support agentic commerce, including: policy-driven automated workflows, secure APIs, and well-defined tools that make Orders safely addressable by agents and AI systems.
What they're looking for
- 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, including policy-driven entitlements and consistency or availability trade-offs.
- Deep expertise with asynchronous workflows and event-driven architectures: such as Kafka or Pub/Sub, including at-least-once or exactly-once processing and outbox patterns.
- Experience integrating with diverse internal services and external partners,: with clear ownership of API contracts, data models, service expectations, and operational readiness.
- Success building or evolving multi-tenant, extensible platforms that enable: rapid onboarding of new product flows, payment methods, incentive types, or partner integrations.
- Strong observability and reliability engineering practices, including: tracing, metrics, alerting, circuit breaking, and chaos testing.
- Experience with secure-by-default service design, including tokenization,: secrets management, PCI considerations, or PII considerations.
- Interest in applying AI and agentic patterns to platform engineering work in: a safe, reliable, and measurable way.
