Staff Software Engineer, Partnerships
About the role
Overview
The Partnerships team sits within Instacart’s Core Experience organization and is responsible for how Instacart shows up inside partner ecosystems like Airbnb, Grubhub, The New York Times, and the next wave of strategic partners. Partnerships is an area where the strategic importance and business impact are high and rising.
As a Staff Software Engineer, Partnerships, you will set the technical direction for how we build and scale Embedded Instacart over the next several years. The architecture is still in relatively early stages and yours to help shape - from making new partner integrations turnkey, to defining platform primitives that make future launches fast, resilient, and consistent. You’ll work across a broad backend surface area (identity, cart, checkout, external apis, etc) while partnering closely with iOS, Android, Web, and adjacent teams to deliver cohesive experiences for Instacart customers, partners and their end users.
This is a highly visible, cross-org role with meaningful leadership scope. You’ll have direct partner-engineering exposure (eng-to-eng with teams at Airbnb, Grubhub, NYT, and others), influence roadmaps across Identity, Payments, Cart, Checkout, Fulfillment, Retailer Engineering, Mobile Platform, Growth, and Marketing, and play a key part in determining how Instacart ships partnerships over the next 12+ months and beyond.
About the Job
- Lead architecture for the Partnerships platform
- Own and evolve the technical architecture across identity, cart, checkout, attribution, and partner orchestration for Embedded Instacart.
- Define clear boundaries and contracts between partner-facing and internal systems so that new partnerships can be launched quickly without bespoke one-off solutions.
- Drive the transition from a broad-but-shallow backend surface to a coherent, well-factored platform that is easy to extend and reason about.
- Platformize partnership constructs
- Identify repeatable integration patterns across partners and convert them into reusable building blocks (APIs, services, workflows, configuration, and tooling).
- Reduce and rationalize per-partner customization by making differences explicit, intentional, and configuration-driven where possible.
- Partner with product and partner teams to define SLAs, integration playbooks, and technical standards that keep launches fast, smooth, and predictable.
- Drive cross-org alignment and delivery
- Work closely with