# Staff Software Engineer, Orders Platform

**Company:** [Instacart](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/instacart)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $221k – $280k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** Go, Java, Python, Distributed Systems, Service-Oriented Architecture, Event-Driven Architecture, Kafka, Pub/Sub, Relational Databases, Nosql Databases, APIs, Observability, Circuit Breaking, Chaos Testing, Ai-Assisted Development
**Posted:** 2026-08-10

> Leads the architecture and evolution of Instacart’s large-scale Orders Platform, driving reliable, auditable, event-driven workflows across commerce systems. Requires 10+ years of backend or platform engineering experience, distributed-systems expertise, and strong cross-functional technical leadership.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Lead multi-team initiatives improving the reliability, scalability, and correctness of the Orders platform across checkout, payments, fulfillment, post-order workflows, and partner integrations.
- Define and drive technical strategy for the order lifecycle, including order state machines, guarantees, and service contracts.
- Architect and evolve event-driven, idempotent workflows for order creation, updates, cancellations, substitutions, payments, and refunds.
- Establish clear invariants, observability, and auditable histories across services.
- Partner with Engineering, Payments, Fulfillment, Catalog, Ads, Fraud and Identity, Data, Infrastructure, Product, and business teams.
- Modernize the platform with improved consistency models, multi-tenant abstractions, failure isolation, and secure integrations.
- Design capabilities for agentic commerce, including policy-driven automated workflows, secure APIs, and tools for agents and AI systems.
- Lead design reviews, coach engineers, contribute to critical code paths, and guide technical decisions through design spikes, launches, and cross-team efforts.

## Requirements
- 10+ years of experience designing, developing, and operating large-scale backend or platform systems in production.
- Experience leading complex, cross-functional technical initiatives end to end, including architecture, implementation, rollout, and ongoing operations.
- Strong foundation in distributed systems, service-oriented architectures, and high-volume APIs.
- Hands-on experience with event-driven patterns and idempotent workflows.
- Proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Go, Java, or Python.
- Production experience with relational and NoSQL data stores.
- Experience operating mission-critical services, including on-call ownership, service-level objectives or error budgets, performance tuning, incident management, and post-incident reviews.
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools for design exploration, implementation, code review, or code quality.
- Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.

## Nice-to-haves
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience with payments, orders, logistics, or other high-integrity transactional platforms.
- Expertise in asynchronous workflows and event-driven architectures such as Kafka or Pub/Sub, including at-least-once or exactly-once processing and outbox patterns.
- Experience integrating internal services and external partners with clear API contracts, data models, service expectations, and operational readiness.
- Experience building multi-tenant, extensible platforms.
- Strong observability and reliability engineering practices, including tracing, metrics, alerting, circuit breaking, and chaos testing.
- Experience with secure-by-default service design, tokenization, secrets management, PCI, or PII considerations.
- Interest in applying AI and agentic patterns to platform engineering safely and reliably.

## Compensation and Benefits
- Base salary varies by permanent US work location:
  - CA, NY, CT, NJ: $265,000–$279,500 USD
  - WA: $254,000–$268,000 USD
  - OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI: $243,000–$256,500 USD
  - All other states: $221,000–$233,000 USD
- Eligible for a new hire equity grant and annual refresh grants.
- Market-competitive compensation and benefits.

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