Senior Software Engineer - Core Experience, Growth

Instacart's Growth Lifecycle Incentives team builds coupon experiences, a core revenue driver. The team owns the end-to-end experience for coupon storing, serving, ranking, and merchandising across app, web, and CRM, partnering with Product, Data Science, and Machine Learning Engineers.

We are looking for Senior Software Engineers to design and build backend services and user-facing experiences. You will join a team of 19 engineers in a fast-paced environment, tackling complex problems, balancing new feature work with retailer-driven requests and technical debt.

• Design, build, and own backend services, APIs, and data integrations that power coupon merchandising.
• Implement and iterate on experiments end-to-end, partnering with Product and Data Science to launch and refine A/B tests.
• Identify and execute codebase and product optimizations to improve reliability, performance, and cost efficiency across distributed systems.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to define roadmaps, success metrics, and guardrails.
• Uphold high engineering standards through code reviews, testing, documentation, and architecture decisions.
• Partner with frontend and mobile engineers to deliver cohesive experiences across web, iOS, and Android.

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience with a focus on backend development.
• Proficiency in at least one modern backend language and framework (e.g., Go, Python/Django or Flask/FastAPI, Java/Spring, Ruby/Rails, or Node.js/Express).
• Hands-on experience designing and operating RESTful or gRPC APIs and microservices in production.
• Strong working knowledge of relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and caching/NoSQL stores (e.g., Redis, DynamoDB); ability to write and optimize SQL.
• Experience collaborating with Product and Data Science to build data-informed features and iterate based on experiment results.
• Experience deploying and operating services on a public cloud (e.g., AWS, GCP) and working with containers (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Demonstrated ability to write clean, maintainable code; strong debugging skills; solid testing practices.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Experience with experimentation platforms and A/B testing frameworks.
• Frontend or mobile development experience (e.g., React/TypeScript, React Native, Swift, or Kotlin).
• Exposure to event-driven architectures and analytics tooling (e.g., Kafka or Pub/Sub, feature flag systems, Looker, Amplitude).
• Experience with performance optimization and observability at scale (e.g., profiling, caching strategies, SLOs, Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Comfort thriving in a fast-paced, experimentation-heavy environment.
• Exposure to AI-assisted development and agentic coding workflows.
• Domain experience in coupon or growth systems.

This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. For Canadian based candidates, the base pay range is CAN$168,000—$177,500 CAD. This role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.