Staff Software Engineer, Orders Platform

EngineersOfAI; Northern (KY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Instacart is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Orders Platform to lead foundational platform initiatives and set architectural direction for scale, reliability, and auditability across order workflows and partner integrations.

You will drive event-driven, large-scale systems and collaborate with Payments, Fulfillment, Catalog, Data, and Infrastructure teams to deliver durable platform capabilities that empower product teams.

Qualifications

• Experience leading multi-team platform initiatives.
• Ability to define architectural strategy for scale and auditability.
• Strong collaboration with Payments, Fulfillment, Catalog, Data, and Infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Lead multi-team initiatives to improve reliability, scalability, and correctness of the Orders platform across checkout, payments, fulfillment, post-order workflows, and integrations.
• Define and drive the technical strategy for the order lifecycle, including modeling and evolving order state machines and service contracts.
• Architect event-driven, idempotent workflows for core order flows with observability and auditable histories.

Skills

Platform architecture

Cross-functional collaboration

System reliability

Tools

Event-driven design

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

The Commerce Platform organization at Instacart is seeking an experienced Staff Software Engineer to lead foundational platform initiatives on the Orders Platform team. The Orders platform is the orchestration layer for commerce at Instacart, coordinating the end-to-end lifecycle of every order across customers, shoppers, retailers, payments, fulfillment systems, and partner integrations at scale.

In this role, you will help define and drive the architectural strategy for systems that support hundreds of millions of transactions each year. You will work on the reliability, correctness, scalability, and auditability of order workflows across diverse use cases and fulfillment models, while unlocking new experiences for customers, shoppers, retailers, and partners.

The Orders Platform team sits at the center of Instacart’s commerce stack, which means this role requires deep technical judgment, strong cross-functional partnership, and a willingness to solve complex problems across many domains. If you are a big-picture thinker who enjoys owning high-impact systems, leading multi-team initiatives, and building durable platforms that help teams move faster and more safely, this role is for you.

Instacart is a collaborative, fast-paced environment where engineers are encouraged to act like owners, communicate transparently, and build solutions that help the broader ecosystem succeed. You will partner with teams across Engineering, Product, Data, Infrastructure, and business functions to deliver platform capabilities that can scale with Instacart’s evolving commerce experiences.

About the Job

• Lead multi-team initiatives that improve the reliability, scalability, and correctness of the Orders platform across checkout, payments, fulfillment, post-order workflows, and partner integrations.


• Define and drive the technical strategy for the order lifecycle, including modeling and evolving order state machines, guarantees, and service contracts to support new products, fulfillment models, and surfaces while maintaining strong service expectations and data integrity.


• Architect and evolve event-driven, idempotent workflows for core order flows such as creation, updates, cancellations, substitutions, payments, and refunds, ensuring clear invariants, observability, and auditable histories across services.


• Partner closely with engineering and cross-functional teams across Payments, Fulfillment, Catalog, Ads, Fraud and Identity, Data, and Infrastructure to deliver durable platform capabilities that other product teams can build on safely and quickly.


• Modernize and extend the platform through capabilities such as improved consistency models, multi-tenant abstractions, stronger failure isolation, and secure integrations that increase flexibility and operability at scale.


• Design platform capabilities that support agentic commerce, including policy-driven automated workflows, secure APIs, and well-defined tools that make Orders safely addressable by agents and