Instacart is the North American leader in online grocery and one of the fastest-growing companies in e-commerce. Instacart’s same-day delivery and pickup services bring fresh groceries and everyday essentials to busy people and families across the U.S. and Canada in as fast as an hour. Since its founding in 2012, Instacart has become an essential service for millions of families, while also serving as an immediate, flexible earnings opportunity for hundreds of thousands of shoppers across North America. The company partners with more than 350 retailers and delivers from more than 25,000 stores across more than 5,500 cities in North America. Today, Instacart is accessible to more than 85% of households in the U.S. and more than 70% of households in Canada.

Technology @ Instacart

From a technology point of view, the platform is complex, rapidly scaling and processing millions of transactions in real-time all of the time. Our technology coupled with operational expertise enables Instacart to deliver fresh groceries in as little as an hour. This is a difficult problem to master and we are making it happen. Every day, we solve incredibly hard problems to create an experience for our customers that is absolutely magical.

About Back End at Instacart

Our backend systems power the clients used by millions of customers every year to buy their groceries online. These systems must also support tight integration with the largest retailers in the US and Canada. Backend engineering at Instacart provides the opportunity to work on challenging scaling solutions while also designing the features that will define our industry. You'll have the opportunity to work with an Elasticsearch cluster serving millions of requests per day, a unique order lifecycle system that processes thousands of order per hour, and a recovery system capable of rebuilding the entire Instacart platform from scratch.

Our applications run on Ruby on Rails. We use Postgres, Elasticsearch, and Cassandra as our datastores. Memcached and Redis for caching. Kinesis for stream processing. Sidekiq for job processing. As we grow to serve more customers and deepen our relationships with our retail partners we are constantly given new opportunities to solve fascinating and rewarding challenges.

Responsibilities

• You will be part of a small team, with a large amount of ownership and autonomy for managing things directly.
• You will work closely with product managers, other teams, and both internal and external stakeholders, owning a large part of the process from problem understanding to shipping the solution.
• You will ship high quality, scalable and robust solutions with a sense of urgency.
• You will have the freedom to suggest and drive organization-wide initiatives.

Requirements

• Self-motivation and an enjoyment for a startup environment
• A strong sense of ownership
• Strong knowledge of common back-end Web technologies (such as Ruby on Rails, Python, etc) in a production environment
• An ability to balance a sense of urgency with shipping high quality and pragmatic solutions
• Experience working with a large codebase on a cross functional team.
• Strong knowledge of SQL
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, computer engineering, electrical engineering OR equivalent work experience

Desirable

• Previous technical leadership/platform experience
• Experience building consumer systems at scale
• Interest or experience in distributed systems
• Strong analytical and debugging skills
• iOS or Android experience
• Contributions to the technical communities (e.g. open source, blogging, etc.)

From a technology point of view, our platform is complex, rapidly scaling and processing millions of transactions in real-time all of the time. Our technology coupled with operational expertise enables Instacart to deliver fresh groceries in as little as an hour. We use a modern stack including Ruby/Rails, Python, React and many more technologies.