Senior Software Engineer - Core Experience, Growth

Overview

Instacart’s Growth Lifecycle Incentives team builds coupon experiences, one of the company’s core revenue drivers. We own the end-to-end experience for coupon storing, serving, ranking, and merchandising in app, web and CRM, partnering closely with Product, Data Science and Machine Learning Engineers, Retailer Managers to deliver features that make the coupon more valuable and accessible. We’re looking for Senior Software Engineers to design and build backend services and user-facing experiences. 

You’ll join a team of 19 engineers operating in a fast-paced environment. If you thrive on tackling complex problems, balancing new feature work with retailer-driven requests and technical debt, and rolling up your sleeves to deliver impact, this role is for you.

About the Job

• Design, build, and own backend services, APIs, and data integrations that power coupon merchandising.
• Implement and iterate on experiments end-to-end—partnering with Product and Data Science to ideate, launch, measure, and refine A/B tests that move key metrics.
• Identify and execute codebase and product optimizations that improve reliability, performance, and cost efficiency across distributed systems.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to define roadmaps, success metrics, and guardrails; communicate tradeoffs clearly in a fast-paced, experiment-driven environment.
• Uphold high engineering standards through code reviews, testing, documentation, and thoughtful architecture decisions that balance speed with quality.
• Partner with frontend and mobile engineers to deliver cohesive, high-quality experiences across web, iOS, and Android.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience with a focus on backend development.
• Proficiency in at least one modern backend language and framework (e.g., Go, Python/Django or Flask/FastAPI, Java/Spring, Ruby/Rails, or Node.js/Express).
• Hands-on experience designing and operating RESTful or gRPC APIs and microservices in production.
• Strong working knowledge of relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and caching/NoSQL stores (e.g., Redis, DynamoDB); ability to write and optimize SQL.
• Experience collaborating with Product and Data Science to build data-informed features and iterate based on experiment results.
• Experience deploying and operating services on a public cloud (e.g., AWS, GCP) and working with containers (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) or similar orchestration.
• Demonstrated ability to write clean, maintainable code; strong debugging skills; and solid testing practices (unit/integration).
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with experimentation platforms and A/B testing frameworks, including experiment design, instrumentation, and analysis.
• Frontend or mobile development experience (e.g., React/TypeScript, React Native, Swift, or Kotlin) and comfort collaborating across the stack.
• Exposure to event-driven architectures and analytics tooling (e.g., Kafka or Pub/Sub, feature flag systems, Looker, Amplitude, or similar).
• Experience with performance optimization and observability at scale (e.g., profiling, caching strategies, SLOs, Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Comfort thriving in a fast-paced, experimentation-heavy environment with ambiguity, rapid iteration, and frequent learning cycles.
• Exposure to AI-assisted development and agentic coding workflows.
• Domain experience in coupon or growth systems.

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