Software Engineer II

Software Engineer II at 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. 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

Instacart is on a mission to give everyone access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Today, Instacart's technology enables millions of users in North America, hundreds of thousands of shoppers, and more than 1,400 retailers across more than 80,000 locations. Our intuitive, simple solutions for retailers, customers, brands and shoppers are transforming how the world shops, eats and lives.

Groceries delivered to your door in as little as 30 minutes! Simple, right? Well, not quite. From re-routing deliveries during snowstorms, to connecting customers with coupons and deals for their favorite brands, to updating billions of data points flowing through hundreds of systems, to optimizing the complex value balance between 4 key stakeholders (consumers, retailers, brands, and shoppers), our engineering efforts build cutting edge systems and technologies that collective provide a state-of-the-art operating system for the grocery industry. We tackle big problems in distributed systems, data management, AI / ML including leveraging the best of Generative AI, quantitative optimization, UX and product building, and more - see our Tech Blog for a sample of the kind of exciting engineering problems we tackle on a daily basis. Building with Instacart Engineering means turning all these deep technical problems into real solutions and features that your friends and family will see and use.

About The Job

• Design, build, validate, and ship high quality product features with a strong sense of urgency, efficiency, and ownership
• Work closely with product managers, designers, data scientists, and peer engineering teams to define project requirements and execution plans
• Ensure that system designs including APIs, deployment architecture, and dependency selection result in highly scalable, robust solutions that minimize support costs and improve an outstanding customer experience
• Contribute broadly to Instacart’s success by exercising your freedom to suggest and drive organization-wide initiatives
• Work within a team that manages petabytes of data used by hundreds of people across the company for the core product, machine learning, reporting, analysis, and much more
• Design, develop, and maintain highly efficient data pipelines for ingesting, transforming, and delivering data from various sources
• Design and build data models and work together with application engineers to ensure the collection of high quality data

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• Recent degree in a technology discipline such as Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Electrical Engineering
• 3-6 years of work experience post-graduation in a technology field
• Experience working with distributed systems
• A strong sense of ownership and intellectual curiosity to understand problems in depth
• Previous experience building features end to end or publishing your own app
• Prior experience with Python, Ruby, React, PostgreSQL, Go
• Excellent collaborator who is able to work with teammates to objectively problem-solve
• Growth mindset - seeks and is receptive to actionable feedback and growth opportunities
• Takes accountability seriously; able to deliver responsibilities on time and on budget
• Self-motivated and thrives in a fast-paced environment
• Able to work in small teams with significant ownership and autonomy

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous experience in a fast-paced startup environment
• Data Engineering experience: designing and implementing data pipelines, optimizing data schemas, ensuring data quality & integrity
• Experience with NoSQL databases
• Experience with data streaming & big data technologies: Apache Spark, Airflow, Hadoop

Why Join Instacart Engineering, Toronto

• Flexibility to work remotely several days a week and work out of a state of the art office in the heart of Toronto’s Liberty Village
• Learn from world class engineering leaders, many of whom are industry veterans with illustrative experiences in Google, Meta, Amazon, and other major tech companies
• Make an impact that directly helps millions of customers, retailers, brands, and shoppers, right from day one!
• Gain exposure to how a world class engineering team works, from sprint planning to shipping code, as well as close cross-functional collaborations with Product, UX, Business, Data Science, and other partners
• Generous learning and development opportunities and an annual $1,000 Personal Professional Development stipend for you to grow your skills and career
• Opportunities available across the entire spectrum of Software Engineer II roles: data, frontend, backend, systems, infrastructure, optimization, and more!

Key skills/competency

• Distributed Systems
• Data Pipelines
• AI/ML
• Quantitative Optimization
• Product Building
• Python
• PostgreSQL
• Scalable Solutions
• Data Modeling
• Apache Spark