Senior Software Engineer II, FAI

Overview

Instacart is building the operating system for the grocery industry, and our FAI team develops the intelligence behind how orders are promised, picked, batched, and delivered. As a Senior Software Engineer II on FAI, you’ll join a team of 14 engineers partnering closely with product, data science, machine learning, and operations to power real-time decisions that keep our marketplace running smoothly for customers, shoppers, and retail partners.

In this role, you will design, build, and operate scalable, low-latency services and data pipelines that directly affect customer experience and business outcomes at high scale. You’ll have significant ownership across the stack—from architecture and implementation to reliability, observability, and on-call—while collaborating across disciplines to turn ideas into production systems.

This position is open to candidates across Canada, with a preference for those in or near Toronto. We value a culture that goes far together, rolls up sleeves to get the job done, and communicates with clarity and empathy—so you can do the best work of your career while helping millions get the groceries they love.

About the Job

• Design, build, and operate resilient, low-latency microservices and data pipelines that power fulfillment planning, inventory availability, and delivery promises.
• Partner with machine learning and data science to productionize models and features, enable online experimentation, and continuously improve decision quality.
• Own services end-to-end, from technical design and RFCs through implementation, rollout, observability, and participation in an on-call rotation.
• Drive reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency through SLOs, capacity planning, incident reviews, and performance optimization.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Marketplace, and Operations to define roadmaps and deliver measurable customer and business impact.
• Mentor other engineers via code and design reviews, pair programming, and contributions to engineering best practices and standards.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend services or distributed systems.
• Proficiency in at least one of the following languages: Go, Java, Python, or Scala.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating microservices on a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) using containers/orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Strong SQL skills and experience with event streaming and data stores (e.g., Kafka or Pub/Sub; Redis; PostgreSQL or MySQL).
• Proven ownership of production services, including observability (metrics, logging, tracing) and participation in an on-call rotation.
• Experience delivering in an agile environment and collaborating effectively with product managers, data scientists, and cross-functional partners.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building real-time decisioning systems for logistics, marketplaces, ads, or e-commerce.
• Familiarity with ML feature stores, model serving, or experimentation platforms and A/B testing frameworks.
• Knowledge of algorithms and data structures relevant to optimization problems (e.g., routing, matching, forecasting).
• Experience with the GCP ecosystem (e.g., GKE, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Cloud SQL) or equivalent services on other clouds.
• Demonstrated impact mentoring engineers and leading cross-team technical initiatives from concept to production.
• Comfort operating in fast-paced, ambiguous environments and iterating quickly based on data and user feedback.

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