Senior Software Engineer II

Summary

Join Instacart's Payments team as a Senior Software Engineer II and play a critical role in processing over $100M daily. You will design, develop, and maintain scalable backend systems for payment processing, implement payment APIs, lead technical projects across multiple teams, and integrate with external payment partners. This role requires collaboration with cross-functional teams and a focus on optimizing systems for cost and performance. You will mentor junior engineers and drive platform improvements impacting key business metrics. The position offers a competitive compensation and benefits package, including equity grants, and is remote with flexibility.

Requirements

• 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

Responsibilities

• 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

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

Benefits

• Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work
• This role is remote
• Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants