[Remote] Staff Software Engineer, Home & Cross-Retailer Search

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing essential services for customers to access their favorite foods. The Staff Software Engineer on the Home & Cross-Retailer Search team will build the infrastructure that determines what customers see and buy, focusing on retrieval, distributed systems, and machine learning.ResponsibilitiesDefine and drive the multi-year technical vision for Home and Cross-Retailer Search infrastructure, spanning retrieval, ranking, indexing, and personalization at scaleOwn the architecture of Instacart's cross-retailer search platform, ensuring correctness, freshness, and low latency as catalog and query volume growsOwn Home feed ranking and content strategy, retailer selection, and personalized recommendations driven by real-time and batch ML signalsPartner with ML Platform and Applied Science to productionize ranking models and improve experimentation infrastructure - A/B testing, interleaving, and offline evalAccelerate 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 frictionSet the technical bar through design reviews, reliability standards, latency budgets, and observability practicesLead major cross-org initiatives end-to-end, from scoping through rollout and post-launch ownershipRepresent the engineering perspective in product and business planning, translating ambiguous problems into well-scoped technical strategies with clear tradeoffsMentor and grow engineers across Home and XRS teamsSkills10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of leading large-scale distributed systems in productionDemonstrated experience as a technical lead or architect on cross-team, multi-quarter initiatives driving alignment, making hard tradeoffs, and delivering resultsDeep expertise in backend systems: high-throughput APIs, data pipelines, caching strategies, and storage systemsExperience building or scaling search, recommendations, or feed-ranking systems at significant traffic volumeStrong command of system design principles: reliability, fault tolerance, observability, graceful degradationProficiency in one or more of: Ruby, Go, Python, Java, or similar backend languages; comfort across the stack to debug and contribute where neededStrong communication skills - able to write crisp technical documents and drive alignment across engineering, product, and business stakeholdersBS/MS in Computer Science, a related fieldExperience at a marketplace or e-commerce platform with complex catalog, inventory, or fulfillment constraintsFamiliarity with ML serving infrastructure, feature stores, and online/offline evaluation frameworksExperience 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 ratesPrior work on personalization systems using collaborative filtering, contextual bandits, or session-based signalsBenefitsInstacart is a Flex First teamEmployees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person eventsThis role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grantsCompany OverviewInstacart is an online grocery platform that offers same-day delivery and pickup services for retailers and consumers. It was founded in 2012, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA, with a workforce of 1001-5000 employees. Its website is https://www.instacart.com.Company H1B SponsorshipInstacart has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 23 in 2026, 152 in 2025, 173 in 2024, 109 in 2023, 159 in 2022, 170 in 2021, 59 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.