Staff Software Engineer, Shopper Activation & Engagement

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 Instacart’s Shopper Activation Engagement team owns the complete shopper lifecycle—from activation and onboarding through engagement, earnings, quality and ratings, recognition, retention, and safety.

Our mission is to help millions of shoppers get started, succeed, and thrive on our marketplace while ensuring compliance and operational excellence. We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to serve as the Activation Domain Tech Lead. In this role, you’ll define the technical strategy and architecture for critical shopper activation surfaces such as onboarding funnel optimization, waitlist management, supply levers, and compliance systems.

You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, Data Science, Operations, Legal, Trust Safety, and key onboarding vendors to deliver fast, safe, and scalable solutions. This is a high-impact role where your work directly influences shopper supply, marketplace efficiency, and our ability to scale sustainably while maintaining quality and regulatory standards. If you thrive in fast-moving, highly cross-functional environments and enjoy rolling up your sleeves to solve complex problems at scale, you’ll feel right at home here.

We go far together, communicate with candor, and prioritize solutions where everyone can win. About the Job Define and drive the end-to-end technical strategy and architecture for the activation domain, enabling rapid, safe delivery as the roadmap scales to support millions of shoppers. Lead product strategy in partnership with Product and Design across onboarding funnel optimization, waitlist management, incentives, and supply levers; set clear OKRs, instrumentation, and experimentation plans.

, background checks, identity/eligibility workflows), building auditable, privacy-first systems with strong observability and SLAs.

Requirements

into crisp technical plans, manage risk and dependencies, and unblock execution. Mentor and develop engineers through design reviews, high-quality code practices, and clear technical standards; raise the technical bar and cultivate the next generation of technical leaders. Continuously improve reliability, performance, and cost efficiency of services; establish and enforce SLOs, drive incident learnings, and champion secure-by-default, AI-augmented development workflows.

Minimum Qualifications

10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, high-traffic services, or mobile backends. 3+ years owning end-to-end architecture and technical strategy for a domain or product area, from design through production operations.