Senior Software Engineer, Technical Search Visibility

About Instacart

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.

Instacart is a Flex First team. 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.

Overview of the Role

The Marketing Enablement & Technology (MET) team sits within Instacart's Marketing organization, building the systems, data pipelines, and platforms powering Instacart's growth. Operating at the intersection of Marketing, Product, and Engineering, we own the platforms behind campaign feeds, audience targeting, event pipelines, and QA automation. We're seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Technical Search Visibility to lead initiatives that enhance Instacart's search engine visibility and drive organic traffic — one of our most substantial growth levers. You'll design scalable systems improving SEO performance across millions of web pages, architect robust data pipelines, and work across the full stack to ensure our platform is discoverable by millions of users. You'll lead projects end-to-end, drive technical direction, mentor engineers, and partner closely with Marketing and Product leadership to shape technical and product strategy.

About The Job

• Lead complete SEO and AEO projects independently, defining experimentation, development, and rollout strategies across multiple systems with minimal guidance.
• Design, build, and ship high-quality full-stack features that enhance search engine visibility, AI answer engine performance, and organic traffic with urgency, efficiency, and ownership.
• Architect scalable, robust solutions applying deep technical knowledge to optimize for traditional search rankings, LLM visibility, user experience, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Design and maintain efficient data pipelines for SEO and AEO data ingestion, transformation, and delivery, while identifying and solving root problems in search visibility through reusable abstractions.
• Partner directly with Marketing and Product stakeholders to influence features and requirements, making well-reasoned trade-offs between complexity, business value, and delivery timelines, while mentoring junior engineers and driving team productivity.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 5–8 years of software engineering experience with expert-level proficiency in React, Ruby, Python, PostgreSQL, and SQL.
• Proven track record of leading complete projects end-to-end, including architecture design, implementation, experimentation, and production rollout.
• Strong experience with distributed systems and data engineering — designing pipelines, optimizing schemas, and ensuring data quality — with experience in Airflow or DBT.
• Demonstrated ability to design for performance, scalability, and robustness, with experience implementing comprehensive observability solutions (logging, metrics, tracing).
• Strong product thinking with the ability to influence product direction and make strategic trade-offs balancing technical and business considerations.
• Excellent communication skills with a proven ability to mentor engineers, drive cross-team alignment, and translate technical concepts for diverse stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience with SEO/AEO initiatives or deep understanding of SEO best practices, answer engine optimization for LLMs, structured data (Schema.org), search engine crawling/indexing, and Core Web Vitals.
• Understanding of how AI-powered search engines and LLMs consume and surface content, with experience optimizing for AI answer generation.
• Experience with big data technologies (Apache Spark, Airflow, Hadoop), NoSQL databases, and data warehousing platforms (Snowflake, Redshift).
• Track record managing technical debt strategically and leading system modernization efforts.
• Experience with cloud cost optimization and A/B testing frameworks for measuring SEO/AEO impact.
• Previous experience partnering with marketing teams on growth initiatives in fast-paced startup environments.

Key skills/competency

• SEO/AEO Strategy
• Full-Stack Development
• Data Pipeline Design
• Distributed Systems
• React, Ruby, Python
• PostgreSQL, SQL
• System Architecture
• Technical Leadership
• Product Thinking
• Mentorship