[Hiring] Senior Software Engineer @Instacart

Role Description

We're seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Paid MarTech pod to architect and scale backend services and ETL processes enabling marketing campaign execution, conversion tracking, and third-party integrations across Paid Social, Display, SEM, Online Video, Linear Television, and Streaming Audio. You'll lead projects end-to-end, drive technical direction, mentor engineers, and partner closely with Marketing, Operations, and Product leadership to shape technical and product strategy.

• Lead complete projects independently across backend services, APIs, and data pipelines, defining experimentation, development, and rollout strategies across multiple systems with minimal guidance.
• Architect scalable, robust solutions for performance, reliability, and cost efficiency, applying deep technical knowledge to design systems that handle high-throughput marketing operations.
• Drive technical improvements by identifying and solving deeper underlying problems, designing appropriate abstractions to simplify complexity and promote reusability across the codebase.
• Partner directly with Marketing and Product stakeholders to influence features and requirements, bringing strong technical perspective while making well-reasoned trade-offs between complexity, business value, and delivery timelines.
• Mentor junior engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, and onboarding support, while contributing to team productivity through process improvements and automation.

Qualifications

• 5–8 years of software engineering experience with expert-level proficiency in Python for building scalable backend services, APIs, and data pipelines.
• Proven track record of leading complete projects end-to-end, including architecture design, implementation, experimentation, and production rollout.
• Deep expertise with data integration technologies (Snowflake, SQL, ETL processes) and workflow orchestration tools (Airflow, DBT).
• Demonstrated ability to design for performance, scalability, and robustness, with experience implementing comprehensive observability solutions (logging, metrics, tracing).
• Strong product thinking with ability to research problems deeply, influence product direction, and make strategic trade-offs balancing technical and business considerations.
• Excellent communication skills with proven ability to mentor engineers, drive cross-team alignment, and translate technical concepts for diverse stakeholders.

Requirements

• Experience architecting and implementing automation frameworks and reusable abstractions that improve team productivity and system extensibility.
• Advanced knowledge of ad platform APIs (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Snapchat Ads) and conversion tracking mechanisms at scale.
• Deep understanding of digital marketing operations and performance marketing KPIs (ROAS, LTV, CAC, CPA) with ability to identify technical opportunities that drive business impact.
• Experience with cloud cost optimization, chaos engineering, and disaster recovery planning.
• Track record of managing technical debt strategically and leading legacy system modernization efforts.
• Experience with security-by-design principles and leading incident response for production systems.
• Demonstrated ability to leverage AI tools for significant productivity improvements and contribute to AI-assisted development infrastructure.

Benefits

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