Staff Software Engineer, Membership & Benefits

Overview

The Commerce Platform team within Instacart’s Commerce Experience organization is seeking an experienced software engineer to lead foundational platform initiatives across our Memberships and Alternate Payments domains. You’ll help define and drive the architectural strategy for mission-critical systems that support hundreds of millions of loyalty and alternate payment transactions each day.

This is a high-visibility role with outsized impact. You will shape the technical roadmap for Instacart+ membership benefits and external loyalty integrations, architect a unified incentives platform spanning coupons, credits, and gift cards, and evolve our systems to natively support agentic commerce through secure, extensible interfaces. You’ll collaborate closely with seasoned engineers and technical leaders across Payments, Growth, Infrastructure, Data, and Security to deliver durable, scalable outcomes.

You’ll partner across 3 engineering teams (approximately 25 engineers in total), bringing clarity to complex, cross-functional efforts while upholding a high bar for design quality, operational excellence, and collaboration. If you thrive in fast-paced environments, roll up your sleeves to solve hard problems, and enjoy aligning diverse stakeholders around elegant solutions, this role is for you. This role is remote within Canada.

About the Job

• Lead multi-team initiatives that improve the reliability, scalability, and correctness of Memberships and Alternate Payments platforms across Instacart’s ecosystem.
• Set and drive the technical strategy for scaling loyalty systems, including Instacart+ membership benefits and external loyalty program integrations.
• Architect a unified benefits platform spanning coupons, credits, and gift cards to simplify incentives and advance affordability initiatives.
• Evolve the platform with new capabilities and modernization efforts to increase flexibility, operability, and secure integrations at scale.
• Design platform capabilities that natively support agentic commerce via policy-driven, automated workflows and secure, extensible MCP-style integrations.
• Raise the technical bar by leading design reviews, coaching engineers, and contributing hands-on to critical code paths during design spikes, launches, and cross-team efforts.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience designing, developing, and operating large-scale backend or platform systems.
• Proven track record leading complex, cross-functional technical initiatives end to end in production environments.
• Strong foundation in distributed systems, service-oriented architectures, and high-volume APIs; hands-on experience with event-driven patterns and idempotent workflows.
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages (e.g., Go, Java, or Python) and production experience with both relational and NoSQL datastores.
• Experience operating mission-critical services (e.g., on-call ownership, SLOs/error budgets, performance tuning, incident management, and post-incident reviews).
• Demonstrated proficiency with AI-assisted development tools to accelerate design exploration, implementation, and code quality.
• Located in Canada in ON, AB, BC or NS 

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience building payments, loyalty, promotions, or benefits platforms, including high-integrity transactional systems and policy-driven entitlements.
• Background designing systems that support agentic commerce and making platforms safely agent-addressable through secure, well-defined tool or API interfaces (e.g., MCP-style integrations or similar patterns).
• Deep expertise with asynchronous workflows and event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka, Pub/Sub), including exactly-once/at-least-once semantics and outbox patterns.
• Experience integrating with diverse internal services and external partners with clear ownership of API contracts, data models, and operational readiness.
• Success building or evolving multi-tenant, extensible platforms that enable rapid onboarding of new payment methods, incentive types, or loyalty integrations.
• Strong observability and reliability engineering practices (tracing, metrics, alerting, circuit breaking, chaos testing) baked into system design.
• Security and compliance fundamentals for commerce systems (e.g., tokenization, secrets management, PCI considerations) and secure-by-default service design.

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