Staff Software Engineer, Web

Instacart Instacart · Consumer · United States · Remote · Software Engineering

Staff Software Engineer, Web at Instacart, focusing on the web platform architecture for customer discovery, search, and personalization. The role involves setting technical direction, building features, improving performance and SEO, and partnering with ML teams to surface real-time recommendations. Requires deep expertise in modern web technologies and large-scale web platforms, with a focus on mentoring and influencing technical strategy.

What you'd actually do

  1. Set the technical direction for Instacart's home and search web experiences, including architecture decisions around rendering, data fetching, and client performance.
  2. Build innovative features that help customers discover new retailers and deepen engagement with existing ones.
  3. Drive improvements to Core Web Vitals, page load performance, and overall frontend health.
  4. Improve SEO and organic discovery to help new customers find Instacart.
  5. Partner with ML and backend teams to surface personalized, real-time search and recommendations on the web.

Skills

Required

  • web systems design
  • frontend architecture
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Next.js
  • end-to-end system architecture
  • large-scale web platforms
  • web performance optimization
  • rendering
  • Core Web Vitals
  • bundle size
  • caching strategies
  • client-side data fetching
  • engineering design reviews
  • mentoring engineers

Nice to have

  • Search
  • Recommendations
  • Personalization
  • discovery platforms
  • hybrid architectures
  • webview-based client systems
  • cross-platform web rendering
  • machine learning
  • product
  • design teams
  • frontend platforms
  • design systems
  • online grocery
  • marketplace
  • e-commerce ecosystem

What the JD emphasized

  • extensive experience in a senior/staff engineer role
  • deep expertise in modern web technologies
  • proven experience designing and operating large-scale web platforms
  • ability to dive deep into web performance optimization
  • experience leading engineering design reviews
  • experience building web systems used and maintained by large engineering organizations
  • strong communication skills
  • track record of mentoring engineers
  • Experience in Search, Recommendations, Personalization, or related discovery platforms is a huge plus.