Staff Software Engineer, Home & Cross-Retailer Search
Core
Designing and building the infrastructure for personalized search, retrieval, and ranking across Instacart's home feed and cross-retailer platforms to determine what tens of millions of customers see and buy.
Role type
Staff Software Engineer (Search & Distributed Systems)
Builds
Cross-retailer search platform, home feed ranking, and personalization infrastructure
Domain
Grocery delivery, e-commerce, search, and machine learning
Deliverable
production ML models | product features | infrastructure
Required skills
Distributed systems architecture, backend systems design, search/recommendation system design, system reliability and fault tolerance, Ruby/Go/Python/Java, technical leadership, cross-team alignment
Preferred skills
Marketplace/e-commerce platform experience, ML serving infrastructure, real-time data pipelines (Kafka, Flink, Spark), search indexing (Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch), personalization algorithms (collaborative filtering, bandits)
Technologies
Ruby, Go, Python, Java, Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming, Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch
Responsibilities
Define multi-year technical vision for search infrastructure, own cross-retailer search platform architecture, drive home feed ranking and content strategy, partner on productionizing ranking models, accelerate developer velocity, set technical standards, lead cross-org initiatives, mentor engineers
Seniority
Staff, hands-on IC with strategic scope
