Senior Software Engineer II — Self-Serve Productivity

EngineersOfAI; United States; Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Instacart is seeking a Senior Software Engineer II to join the Self-Serve Productivity team. This fullstack role emphasizes frontend development and building Portal, a central hub for data management.

The position involves architecture leadership, mentoring, and working closely with data scientists and product engineers to enhance tools used across the company. Ideal candidates should have 7+ years of experience, proficiency in React and TypeScript, and a comprehensive understanding of data infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of working experience in software development.
• Self-motivation and enjoyment in startup environments.
• Strong sense of ownership and ability to work in a team.

Responsibilities

• Lead frontend architecture and product execution on Portal.
• Contribute to Python services and data pipelines.
• Mentor other team members in engineering excellence.

Skills

Strong frontend expertise

React

TypeScript

Python

SQL

Data pipelines

APIs

Data infrastructure technologies

Tools

Snowflake

Airflow

dbt

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

About the Role

We are currently seeking a Senior Software Engineer II to join our Self-Serve Productivity team. This is a fullstack role with a frontend lean, focused on building and extending Portal — Instacart's central hub for everything data. You'll partner closely with data scientists, data engineers, analysts, and product engineers to design and ship the tools they use every day to discover, understand, and trust data. You'll have meaningful ownership over user-facing surfaces that touch the entire company.

About the Team

The mission of the Instacart Self-Serve team is to improve the productivity of data practitioners through easy-to-use, self-serve tools. The Productivity sub-team owns Portal (data discovery, lineage, metadata, data quality), our semantic layer (Medusa), and a number of supporting systems built on dbt and Airflow. Portal is going through significant UI investment — including a homepage/dashboard redesign and deeper integration across the data infra ecosystem — making this a high-impact time to join.

About the Job

• You will be part of a small team with a large amount of ownership and surface area, given that the tooling is used by the entire company.
• You will lead frontend architecture and product execution on Portal, while contributing across the stack where needed (Python services, data pipelines, APIs).
• You will have the freedom to suggest and drive new initiatives — including how Portal evolves as the unified data home base at Instacart.
• You are expected to mentor other team members and be a champion of engineering excellence, particularly around frontend craft, performance, and UX quality.
• You will work closely with other teams (Data Science, ML, Product Eng, Infra) to understand their main pain points around data and translate them into self-serve and reliable solutions.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• Self-motivation and an enjoyment for a startup environment
• A strong sense of ownership
• Strong frontend expertise — deep experience with React and TypeScript, with a track record of shipping polished, performant product UI in a large codebase
• Comfort working fullstack — able to extend backend services (Python) and reason about APIs, data models, and pipelines as needed
• Strong knowledge of SQL and familiarity with common data infrastructure technologies (Python, Airflow, Snowflake, dbt) in a production environment
• Experience working with a large codebase on a cross-functional team
• An ability to balance a sense of urgency with shipping high quality and pragmatic solutions
• A product mindset — you care about the experience your tools create, not just the systems behind them
• 7+ years of working experience in a similar field/environment

Preferred Qualifications