Senior Software Engineer, Customers Back End

Technology @ Instacart

From a technology point of view, the platform is complex, rapidly scaling and processing millions of transactions in real-time all of the time. Our technology coupled with operational expertise enables Instacart to deliver fresh groceries in as little as an hour. This is a difficult problem to master and we are making it happen. Every day, we solve incredibly hard problems to create an experience for our customers that is absolutely magical.

About Back End at Instacart

Our backend systems power the clients used by millions of customers every year to buy their groceries online. These systems must also support tight integration with the largest retailers in the US and Canada. Backend engineering at Instacart provides the opportunity to work on challenging scaling solutions while also designing the features that will define our industry. You'll have the opportunity to work with an Elasticsearch cluster serving millions of requests per day, a unique order lifecycle system that processes thousands of order per hour, and a recovery system capable of rebuilding the entire Instacart platform from scratch.

Our applications run on Ruby on Rails. We use Postgres, Elasticsearch, and Cassandra as our datastores. Memcached and Redis for caching. Kinesis for stream processing. Sidekiq for job processing. As we grow to serve more customers and deepen our relationships with our retail partners we are constantly given new opportunities to solve fascinating and rewarding challenges.

Responsibilities

• You will be part of a small team, with a large amount of ownership and autonomy for managing things directly.
• You will work closely with product managers, other teams, and both internal and external stakeholders, owning a large part of the process from problem understanding to shipping the solution.
• You will ship high quality, scalable and robust solutions with a sense of urgency.
• You will have the freedom to suggest and drive organization-wide initiatives.

Requirements

• Self-motivation and an enjoyment for a startup environment
• A strong sense of ownership
• Strong knowledge of common back-end Web technologies (such as Ruby on Rails, Python, etc) in a production environment
• An ability to balance a sense of urgency with shipping high quality and pragmatic solutions
• Experience working with a large codebase on a cross functional team.
• Strong knowledge of SQL
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, computer engineering, electrical engineering OR equivalent work experience

Desirable

• Previous technical leadership/platform experience
• Experience building consumer systems at scale
• Interest or experience in distributed systems
• Strong analytical and debugging skills
• iOS or Android experience
• Contributions to the technical communities (e.g. open source, blogging, etc.)