Senior Software Engineer II, FAI
About the role
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.
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 relational databases.