# Staff Software Engineer, Home & Cross-Retailer Search

**Company:** [Instacart](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/instacart)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $221k – $279k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** Ruby, Go, Python, Java, Elasticsearch, Solr, Opensearch, Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming, Machine Learning, A/B Testing, Distributed Systems, Search Indexing, Personalization Systems
**Posted:** 2026-05-07

> Leads architecture and technical vision for Home & Cross-Retailer Search infrastructure, owning retrieval, ranking, indexing, and ML-driven personalization at massive scale. Requires 10+ years experience in backend systems, search/recommendations, and cross-team leadership.

## Job Description

## 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.

## Minimum Qualifications
- 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.

## Preferred Qualifications
- 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.

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