Staff Android Engineer, Caper

Overview

Instacart’s Caper team is building the next generation of in-store retail technology—from smart carts to connected checkout experiences—powered by Android at the edge. We partner closely with hardware, firmware, payments, security, and cloud teams to deliver reliable, low-latency, and secure experiences that delight retailers, shoppers, and store associates. We’re hiring an Android Engineer to join the Caper Android Platform team. This is not a typical “app” role—you’ll be the technical authority across network reliability (including MQTT and connectivity management), payment terminal integrations, sensor processing, application architecture, and Android platform modernization. You’ll operate at platform depth while influencing product experiences at scale. You’ll help keep our in-store systems running with 99.9% uptime, shepherd cross-team initiatives from design to rollout, and mentor senior engineers across a broader org of Android developers. If you thrive in a fast-paced environment, enjoy working close to hardware, and love solving complex systems problems, this role is for you. This role is remote across the United States and Canada.

About the Job

• Own reliability and performance for the Android platform that powers Caper devices, setting standards and practices that drive 99.9%+ in-store uptime.
• Design and harden connectivity layers, including MQTT-based messaging, Wi‑Fi/Bluetooth management, offline-first sync, and intelligent backoff/retry strategies.
• Integrate and secure payment terminal workflows (e.g., EMV/contactless), partnering with vendors and internal security to deliver resilient, compliant transactions.
• Build and optimize real-time data pipelines for sensors and peripherals (e.g., barcode, weight, camera, RFID), ensuring low-latency processing and fault tolerance.
• Modernize Android architecture and tooling (Kotlin, Jetpack, multi-module, DI, testing, CI/CD), guiding migrations and establishing reusable platform libraries and SDKs.
• Lead cross-team technical initiatives end-to-end—from RFCs and design reviews to staged rollouts and incident response—while mentoring senior engineers and raising the engineering bar.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional Android development experience using Kotlin, including Coroutines/Flows and Jetpack, with a track record of shipping and operating production systems or embedded Android products.
• Hands-on expertise with edge-device networking and reliability, including MQTT or similar pub/sub, connectivity management (Wi‑Fi/Bluetooth), offline-first data sync, and production observability (crash/ANR monitoring, logging, metrics).
• Proven experience integrating hardware peripherals on Android—such as payment terminals (EMV/contactless), barcode/RFID/sensors—and applying secure communication and device security fundamentals.
• Demonstrated ability to drive cross-team technical initiatives and mentor other engineers; skilled at breaking down complex platform problems, leading design reviews, and running effective incident postmortems.
• Proficiency with modern Android architecture and tooling (multi-module design, dependency injection with Dagger/Hilt, Gradle and CI/CD, performance profiling); Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AOSP internals, system services, HALs, or NDK for performance-critical components.
• Payments domain expertise (terminal SDKs, kernel certifications, PCI DSS, P2PE) and familiarity with secure key management on Android.
• Background in sensor fusion or real-time stream processing on Android; exposure to computer vision or on-device ML for edge scenarios.
• Experience managing large fleets of managed Android devices (EMM/MDM), OTA updates, feature flags, staged rollouts, and canary strategies.
• Success operating in mission-critical retail, point-of-sale, or similarly high-availability environments, including participation in on-call rotations.

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