Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience

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

The Developer Experience team at Instacart plays a crucial role in making software development easier and more productive. Our customers are the engineers at the heart of Instacart, tackling diverse projects spanning frontend and backend changes, mobile apps, machine learning, and AI-driven innovations. We collaborate closely with various infrastructure and engineering teams to create and refine tools that streamline development workflows. This covers everything from developer onboarding to daily development challenges and testing. Our metrics obsession helps us measure and minimize the lead time from conceptualization to successful deployment in Production.

About the Team

As Instacart evolves, our Developer Experience team is committed to advancing engineering practices to enhance efficiency and quality. We're refining our code review process by accelerating builds and feedback, incorporating AI for preliminary analysis, and streamlining reviewer assignments. Simultaneously, we're leveraging advanced AI in unit testing to deepen coverage and detect issues earlier. Our focus also includes improving the stability and speed of builds and optimizing the local development environment to boost productivity and satisfaction among developers.

What's New and Exciting:
We are extending our local development CLI tool (Bento) capabilities to include advanced build system management and leveraging AI to automate and simplify the development lifecycle. Our new features focus on:

• Owning and Enhancing the Build System: Develop and maintain robust build systems within Bento to support scalable and efficient software deployment.
• Incorporating AI Tools: Integrate AI technologies to streamline workflows, enhance code quality through automated reviews and testing, and reduce the manual burden on developers.

 

About the Job

• Collaborate with team members to enhance Bento, focusing on scalability, usability, and the integration of AI tools.
• Work on the orchestration of on-demand and ephemeral CI environments that allow for integration and E2E tests before merging PRs. This proactive approach shifts quality assurance earlier in the development process (“shift left”), ensuring that only the most stable, well-tested changes are merged into the master branch.
• Continuously engage with metrics to drive improvements in our processes and outcomes, directly enhancing developer productivity and satisfaction.
• Maintain and improve the build systems to allow for 1000+ developers to get changes tested, built and deployed faster.
• A software engineer with a passion for improving developer workflows and a keen interest in the latest technologies, including AI and machine learning.
• Experienced in developing or maintaining build systems, with a strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines.
• A collaborative team player who thrives in an innovative and fast-paced environment.

Join us in making software development a delightful experience for all engineers at Instacart while pushing the boundaries of traditional development practices!

 

ABOUT YOU

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of software development experience
• A strong sense of ownership, self-motivated and enjoy the fast pace of a startup environment
• Previous experience building and maintaining a robust build system using Jenkins, BuildKite, Gitlab or CircleCI
• Strong knowledge of Go, Ruby, or Python and experience with AWS Infrastructure 
• Ability to balance a sense of urgency with shipping high quality and pragmatic solutions

 

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering OR equivalent work experience

Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here.

Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.

For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.

CA, NY, CT, NJ$192,000—$213,000 USDWA$184,000—$204,000 USDOR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI$176,000—$196,000 USDAll other states$159,000—$177,000 USD