Staff Software Engineer, Orders Platform

About the role

You will lead multi-team initiatives that define and evolve the core architecture of the Orders platform, owning the design and long-term strategy for systems that coordinate the end-to-end lifecycle of commerce at Instacart scale. You will drive the architectural direction for order state modeling, service contracts, and guarantees that ensure correctness, reliability, and auditability across diverse fulfillment models and partner integrations. This role requires deep technical judgment to solve complex, cross-domain problems while balancing scalability, operability, and safety in a fast-paced environment. You will partner closely with Engineering, Product, Data, Infrastructure, and business stakeholders to build durable platform capabilities that unlock new experiences for customers, shoppers, retailers, and partners. You are expected to act like an owner, communicating transparently and delivering solutions that help the broader ecosystem move faster and more safely. The role involves modernizing and extending the platform through capabilities such as improved consistency models, multi-tenant abstractions, stronger failure isolation, and secure integrations that increase flexibility at scale. You will 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 autonomous systems.

Key facts

What you'll do

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 autonomous systems.

Define and enforce platform standards, service contracts, and architectural guardrails that enable teams to move faster while maintaining reliability, scalability, and security.

Invest in observability, debugging tools, and auditability for order workflows to support both internal teams and external partners in operating and troubleshooting complex flows.

Collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate business requirements into robust technical designs, ensuring that platform decisions scale sustainably across millions of transactions annually.

Contribute to the broader engineering community through code reviews, design documents, and knowledge sharing that elevate engineering practices across the Orders platform.

Evaluate emerging technologies and patterns to determine applicability to the Orders platform, driving adoption where they provide clear advantages in reliability, performance, or developer experience.

Work closely with SRE and infrastructure teams to ensure platform components meet operational standards for performance, resilience, and security at scale.

Champion best practices in testing, deployment, and release management to reduce risk and increase confidence in changes to critical order workflows.

Act as a technical leader in cross-functional discussions, helping prioritize tradeoffs between speed, correctness, and long-term platform investment.

Represent the Orders platform in broader architecture forums and stakeholder discussions to ensure alignment with company-wide goals and standards.

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant background building and operating large-scale distributed systems.

Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language such as Java, Python, or Go, with demonstrated ability to write clean, testable, and maintainable code.

Deep understanding of distributed systems principles, including consistency models, idempotency, fault tolerance, and observability.

Experience designing and operating event-driven architectures and workflows that require strict correctness, auditability, and reliability.

Proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives and influence technical direction across multiple teams and stakeholders.

Experience with commerce, retail, or marketplace systems is highly relevant, including familiarity with order management, inventory, and payments concepts.

Strong knowledge of APIs, service contracts, and integration patterns used to connect diverse systems securely and at scale.

Comfort working in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment where priorities can shift quickly and problems are complex.

Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

U.S. authorization to work is required, and sponsorship is not available for this role.

Ability to relocate to or remain in the United States for the duration of employment, with no current remote location restrictions.

Nice to have

Experience with agentic systems, policy engines, and workflow automation platforms.

Familiarity with retail or grocery commerce domains, including order orchestration, substitutions, and real-time decisioning.

Background in platform engineering, developer experience, or infrastructure tooling.

Experience with event sourcing, CQRS, or complex state machine modeling in distributed systems.

Practical notes

This role is based in the United States and requires authorization to work in the United States. Sponsorship is not available for this role. Candidates must be able to relocate to or remain in the United States for the duration of employment.