Senior Software Engineer, Fulfillment

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.

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.

Instacart is seeking a backend engineer with demonstrated success building highly reliable, performant and scalable software to shape the platform powering real-world, real-time processes. The Logistics Platform team owns the execution layer of Instacart’s fulfillment system across the globe, including batching, routing, dispatch, and shopper pay. This role builds the platform that routes orders, allocates fulfillment execution tasks to shoppers, tracks fulfillment status and determines compensation. A year from now, shoppers get efficient and fulfilling work, retailers and consumer brands improve their value proposition, and customers receive their orders on time and to their satisfaction.

• Backend applications and systems for routing, task allocation, fulfillment tracking and shopper compensation are architected, built and maintained
• Technical design for high-impact projects and initiatives is led, with logistics problems across the consumer marketplace and enterprise space solved through shipped features
• Tier-0 systems are reliable and observable, with clear ownership
• Platform best practices are driven through alignment with product, compliance and engineering stakeholders
• AI-assisted tooling and workflows raise day-to-day productivity for you and the team, and engineers are mentored toward a higher bar for code quality, testing, and operational practices

• 5+ years of backend development experience
• Fluency in at least one backend language (we use Ruby, Python and Go; Ruby experience not required)
• Strong working knowledge of services/API design (REST/RPC), databases, and system design patterns and principles for distributed, scalable systems
• Experience building and operating asynchronous, event-driven systems in production
• Excellent communication skills with experience working in complex cross-functional and highly collaborative environments
• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

• Experience building software for fulfillment, logistics, or e-commerce
• Experience with workflow orchestration or state machines
• Regular use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex, etc
• Experience building systems subject to regulatory or financial compliance

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