Staff Software Engineer, Home & Cross-Retailer Search

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing essential services for customers to access food and household goods. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Home & Cross-Retailer Search team, you will lead the technical vision for search infrastructure, focusing on retrieval, ranking, and personalization while ensuring system performance at scale.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the multi-year technical vision for Home and Cross-Retailer Search infrastructure, spanning retrieval, ranking, indexing, and personalization at scale
• Own the architecture of Instacart's cross-retailer search platform, ensuring correctness, freshness, and low latency as catalog and query volume grows
• Own Home feed ranking and content strategy, retailer selection, and personalized recommendations driven by real-time and batch ML signals
• Partner with ML Platform and Applied Science to productionize ranking models and improve experimentation infrastructure - A/B testing, interleaving, and offline eval
• Accelerate developer velocity across the sub-pillar: reduce time-to-production, build reusable components, and make it easy for product teams to experiment with minimal platform friction
• Set the technical bar through design reviews, reliability standards, latency budgets, and observability practices
• Lead major cross-org initiatives end-to-end, from scoping through rollout and post-launch ownership
• Represent the engineering perspective in product and business planning, translating ambiguous problems into well-scoped technical strategies with clear tradeoffs
• Mentor and grow engineers across Home and XRS teams

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of leading large-scale distributed systems in production
• Demonstrated experience as a technical lead or architect on cross-team, multi-quarter initiatives driving alignment, making hard tradeoffs, and delivering results
• Deep expertise in backend systems: high-throughput APIs, data pipelines, caching strategies, and storage systems
• Experience building or scaling search, recommendations, or feed-ranking systems at significant traffic volume
• Strong command of system design principles: reliability, fault tolerance, observability, graceful degradation
• Proficiency in one or more of: Ruby, Go, Python, Java, or similar backend languages; comfort across the stack to debug and contribute where needed
• Strong communication skills - able to write crisp technical documents and drive alignment across engineering, product, and business stakeholders
• BS/MS in Computer Science, a related field
• Experience at a marketplace or e-commerce platform with complex catalog, inventory, or fulfillment constraints
• Familiarity with ML serving infrastructure, feature stores, and online/offline evaluation frameworks
• Experience with real-time data pipelines (Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming) and search indexing at scale (Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch)
• Track record of improving developer productivity and platform health: reducing p99 latency, improving cost efficiency and cutting incident rates
• Prior work on personalization systems using collaborative filtering, contextual bandits, or session-based signals