Senior Software Engineer, Technical Search Visibility

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing essential services for grocery delivery. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead initiatives that enhance search engine visibility and drive organic traffic, focusing on designing scalable systems and improving SEO performance across millions of web pages.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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