[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience @Instacart

Role Description

The Developer Experience team at Instacart is the force multiplier for our 1000+ engineers. We define and build the platforms, tools, and practices that enable Instacart engineers to ship high-quality software faster — from AI-powered code review to build infrastructure, developer onboarding, and local development environments. Our success is measured in developer velocity: how quickly an engineer can take an idea from concept to production.

As a Staff Software Engineer on Developer Experience, you will lead the technical direction for the developer infrastructure that every Instacart engineer relies on. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You'll write code, set architectural direction, and partner across the org to move engineering-wide metrics on developer velocity, CI reliability, and the time it takes to get a change safely into production.

• Lead the technical direction for Instacart's local and remote development environments, including ephemeral environments, image-based provisioning, health checks, and the developer-facing ergonomics of the inner development loop.
• Lead the technical direction for our CI pipeline infrastructure and the commit-to-feedback loop, CI reliability, failure diagnostics, flaky-test reduction, and shift-left validation.
• Own the architecture and evolution of our pre-production environments, including staging stability, service-owner accountability models, and environments that let engineers and AI agents validate changes end-to-end in parallel.
• Drive the reliability and resilience of our git infrastructure, git operations at monorepo scale, and implement disaster recovery plans.
• Advance AI-powered developer tooling across the workflow, AI-assisted code review, agentic development workflows, and the platforms that let engineers run many AI sessions in parallel with humans on the loop.
• Design and drive multi-quarter initiatives that measurably improve developer velocity, CI reliability, pre-production health, and the local development loop.
• Own the developer experience metrics for the systems you lead: define what "good" looks like, instrument it, and use the data to prioritize investment.
• Partner with infrastructure, platform, and product engineering teams to roll out platform changes with minimal disruption.
• Set the technical bar for the systems you own on reliability, performance, upgrade cadence, and developer ergonomics.
• Mentor engineers in the team and the broader engineering org; grow the community of developer infrastructure experts at Instacart.
• Represent the team in cross-org technical discussions on local development experience, CI/CD, pre-production, and AI-augmented development.

Qualifications

• A hands-on technical leader who is equally comfortable in a CI pipeline definition, a design doc, a vision document, and a cross-org migration plan.
• Metrics-driven. You use build times, CI failure rates, pre-production pass rates, feedback-loop latency, and developer feedback to guide where to invest.
• A multiplier. You make the engineers around you more effective through mentorship, clear technical writing, and pragmatic guidance.
• Comfortable driving cross-team change. You can build consensus for a migration or a platform shift and see it through to adoption.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software development experience.
• Deep, hands-on experience operating CI/CD systems at scale (e.g., Buildkite, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI), including pipeline design, reliability, and performance tuning for large engineering organizations.
• Experience building or operating local/remote development environments or developer platforms (e.g., ephemeral environments, dev containers, internal PaaS), with a point of view on the inner development loop.
• Track record of leading cross-team technical initiatives with measurable impact on developer velocity, CI reliability, pre-production stability, or feedback-loop time.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), containerization (Docker), and orchestration (ECS/Kubernetes or equivalent).
• Experience with large monorepos and the git infrastructure challenges that come with them.
• Strong technical leadership: driving direction, mentoring engineers, and influencing without direct authority.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• Experience owning or evolving a developer environment platform used by a large engineering org.
• Experience stabilizing pre-production / staging environments at scale, including establishing service-owner accountability and SLAs.
• Experience with AI-powered developer tooling — AI code review, agentic coding workflows, or platforms that run async agentic work for engineers.
• Experience defining and instrumenting developer productivity metrics (CI failure rate, feedback-loop time, pre-production pass rate, local dev loop).
• Experience at high-growth companies operating developer infrastructure for large engineering organizations.

Benefits

• Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits.
• Remote work flexibility.
• New hire equity grant and annual refresh grants.