Senior Software Engineer, Caper Ads

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

About the Role

Are you ready to have maximum impact and work on a 0 to 1 product? We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Ad Formats team and build ad experiences on Caper Carts - an AI-powered smart cart equipped with scales, sensors, touchscreens, and computer vision technology. In this role, you will be responsible for designing and implementing core technologies that bring Instacart's Retail Media business onto Caper Carts, including indexing, serving, rendering, eventing, billing, reporting, experimentation, and more. You will also work closely with product managers, product designers, data scientists, ML engineers, product marketers, and other cross-functional partners.

About the Team

The Ads for Caper team is a newly formed team dedicated to bringing inspiration to the Caper shopping journey. We do this by connecting advertisers with consumers at the right time and place through delightful interactions. We will be building net new experiences and powering them with both existing and new backend ads systems. Come in on the ground floor and help build the team, scale the infrastructure, and support the rapid growth of Caper.

About the Job

We are operating with a startup mentality, and you should as well. You will initially be part of a small team that will grow with the product. We want to move quickly in order to iterate and find product market fit, while maintaining quality and craft. You will primarily be responsible for backend design and implementation, but should not be afraid to jump into other areas to problem solve.

In this role, you will be working cross-organizationally with other engineering teams, as well as cross-functionally with product, design, data science, and marketing to define requirements and long-term roadmap. You will also be responsible for holding the technical bar on the team, ensuring code quality, performance, and establishing coding standards. You will have the opportunity to think and plan strategically for both the product and technical roadmaps.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 6+ years of software development experience.
• Proactive, motivated, and self-driven.
• Solid expertise in server-side technologies such as Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, Ruby on Rails, or similar.
• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases, and the ability to design efficient database schemas.
• Strong analytical and debugging skills.
• Strong sense of ownership working with a large codebase and diverse suite of products.
• Effective communication skills, with the ability to collaborate and influence cross-functional teams.
• Proven experience as a Senior Software Engineer, with a strong focus on backend development, and a track record of successfully delivering business and organizational impact.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior work experience in the digital advertising industry.
• Proven experience with distributed system design.
• Experience with Android development.

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