Senior Software Engineer II, Payments

Instacart; United States; Remote; USD 187,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Instacart is seeking a Senior Software Engineer II to join its Payments team, responsible for implementing secure payment APIs and optimizing backend systems. This position involves leading projects, mentoring engineers, and driving platform improvements, all within a culture of continuous learning and collaboration. Candidates should possess extensive backend engineering experience and strong communication skills to thrive in a cross-functional team.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience in high-scale environments.
• Proficient in backend languages like Ruby, Go, or Java.
• Strong background in operational excellence and monitoring.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain robust backend systems for payment processing.
• Integrate with external payment processors ensuring compliance.
• Lead technical projects across multiple teams.

Skills

Backend engineering

Strong communication

Operational excellence

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or similar

Job description

We're transforming the grocery industry

At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.

Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.

Instacart is a Flex First team

There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees 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 events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.

Overview

Instacart is seeking an experienced and impact-driven Senior Software Engineer II to join our Payments team—one of the most critical pillars of our Platform. Handling over $100 million in transactions daily, our Payments systems sit at the crossroads of high performance, regulatory complexity, and continual innovation. If you are inspired by high-scale challenges and want to play a key technical leadership role in building the future of commerce, we’d love to meet you.

About the Role

As a Senior Software Engineer II on the Payments team, you’ll design, develop, and maintain robust, scalable, and highly available backend systems that power every transaction on Instacart’s platform. Your responsibilities will include implementing secure and reliable payment APIs and services, leading technical projects across teams, and architecting integrations with external payment processors and financial partners. You will have the opportunity to optimize systems for cost, reliability, and operational excellence, while proactively driving platform improvements that move key business metrics. This is a hands-on technical leadership position where you’ll mentor fellow engineers, uphold high standards for code quality, and foster a culture of continuous improvement and ownership.

About the Team

The Payments team is a business-critical, high-impact group within Instacart’s Platform organization. We build and operate foundational systems that must excel in performance, compliance, and reliability—while enabling rapid innovation for all our users. We collaborate cross-functionally with legal, finance, product, data science, and external partners to deliver seamless payment experiences and ensure accounting accuracy.

We value agility, operational excellence, and continuous learning, and we champion a culture where strong design, collaboration, and clear communication are the norm. As part of this team, you’ll shape the future of payments at Instacart and help mentor an exceptional group of engineers.

About the Job

• Design, develop, and maintain robust, scalable, and highly available backend systems for payment processing.
• Implement payment-related APIs and services, ensuring security, reliability, and accuracy at every step of the payment lifecycle.
• Lead technical projects that span multiple teams, from initial design to execution and continuous improvement.
• Integrate with external payment processors, gateways, wallets, and financial partners while ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.
• Optimize systems for cost, performance, observability, and operational efficiency.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners across legal, product, data science, finance, operations, and more.
• Proactively drive platform improvements and initiatives that impact key business metrics.
• Mentor and support fellow engineers, establish best practices, and uphold high standards for code quality and architecture.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or similar.
• 5+ years of backend engineering experience in high-scale, distributed environments.
• Proficient in backend languages (e.g., Ruby, Go, Java).
• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.), caching (Redis, Memcached), and distributed systems.
• Comfortable navigating complex business and technical domains, especially payments, invoicing, billing, or compliance-heavy environments.
• Strong communicator who can lead projects and drive alignment across stakeholders.
• High sense of ownership, capable of working independently, influencing team direction, and mentoring others.
• Strong background in operational excellence: monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
• Hands-on experience driving experimentation and A/B testing when launching new features, with a data-driven approach to measuring and iterating on outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Expertise in payment infrastructure, payment authorization flows, and reconciliation.
• Experience launching payment methods, optimizing for payment success rates, or managing payment costs.
• Experience designing or operating workflows with Temporal or similar workflow orchestration technologies.
• Track record of driving measurable impact through technical innovation in payments or financial systems.
• Thrive in an AI-first engineering environment, leveraging AI-powered tools as part of your workflow and contributing to the ongoing evolution of best practices that boost team productivity.

#LI-Remote

Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here.

Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.

For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.

CA, NY, CT, NJ

$225,000—$250,000 USD

WA

$216,000—$240,000 USD

OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI

$207,000—$230,000 USD

All other states

$187,000—$208,000 USD