Staff Software Engineer, Orders Platform

Overview

The Commerce Platform organization at Instacart is seeking an experienced Staff Software Engineer to lead foundational platform initiatives on the Orders Platform team. The Orders platform is the orchestration layer for commerce at Instacart, coordinating the end-to-end lifecycle of every order across customers, shoppers, retailers, payments, fulfillment systems, and partner integrations at scale.

In this role, you will help define and drive the architectural strategy for systems that support hundreds of millions of transactions each year. You will work on the reliability, correctness, scalability, and auditability of order workflows across diverse use cases and fulfillment models, while unlocking new experiences for customers, shoppers, retailers, and partners.

The Orders Platform team sits at the center of Instacart’s commerce stack, which means this role requires deep technical judgment, strong cross-functional partnership, and a willingness to solve complex problems across many domains. If you are a big-picture thinker who enjoys owning high-impact systems, leading multi-team initiatives, and building durable platforms that help teams move faster and more safely, this role is for you.

Instacart is a collaborative, fast-paced environment where engineers are encouraged to act like owners, communicate transparently, and build solutions that help the broader ecosystem succeed. You will partner with teams across Engineering, Product, Data, Infrastructure, and business functions to deliver platform capabilities that can scale with Instacart’s evolving commerce experiences.

About the Job

• Lead multi-team initiatives that improve the reliability, scalability, and correctness of the Orders platform across checkout, payments, fulfillment, post-order workflows, and partner integrations.
• Define and drive the technical strategy for the order lifecycle, including modeling and evolving order state machines, guarantees, and service contracts to support new products, fulfillment models, and surfaces while maintaining strong service expectations and data integrity.
• Architect and evolve event-driven, idempotent workflows for core order flows such as creation, updates, cancellations, substitutions, payments, and refunds, ensuring clear invariants, observability, and auditable histories across services.
• Partner closely with engineering and cross-functional teams across Payments, Fulfillment, Catalog, Ads, Fraud and Identity, Data, and Infrastructure to deliver durable platform capabilities that other product teams can build on safely.