Senior Software Engineer II, Commerce Platform

Payments

We're seeking an experienced, impact-driven Senior Software Engineer II to join Instacart's Payments team—a business-critical pillar of our Platform. Processing over $100M every day, Payments operates at the intersection of high performance, regulatory complexity, and rapid innovation. We build reliable, accurate, and scalable systems that power every Instacart transaction.

As a technical leader in Payments, you’ll tackle some of Instacart’s most challenging and rewarding problems: optimizing payment costs, improving payment success rates, launching new payment methods, ensuring accounting precision, and architecting robust integrations with external partners. You’ll collaborate closely with various cross functional, external, and other engineering partners to deliver seamless and secure payment experiences for all users.

Our team values agility and thrives on change. We move fast to adapt to evolving business priorities and consistently deliver at a high bar. You’ll help shape the future of our payments platform, mentor talented engineers, and foster a culture centered on ownership, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.

If you're inspired by high-scale, high-impact work and want to lead in an environment that values strong design, collaboration, innovation, and clear communication, we’d love to chat.

About the Job

• Design, develop, and maintain robust, scalable, and highly available backend systems for payment processing.
• Implement payment-related APIs and services, ensuring security, reliability, and accuracy at every step of the payment lifecycle.
• Lead technical projects that span multiple teams, from initial design to execution and continuous improvement.
• Integrate with external payment processors, gateways, wallets, and financial partners while ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.
• Optimize systems for cost, performance, observability, and operational efficiency.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners across legal, product, data science, finance, operations, and more.
• Proactively drive platform improvements and initiatives that impact key business metrics.
• Mentor and support fellow engineers, establish best practices, and uphold high standards for code quality and architecture.

About You

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or similar.
• 5+ years of backend engineering experience in high-scale, distributed environments.
• Proficient in backend languages (e.g., Ruby, Go, Java).
• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.), caching (Redis, Memcached), and distributed systems.
• Comfortable navigating complex business and technical domains, especially payments, invoicing, billing, or compliance-heavy environments.
• Strong communicator who can lead projects and drive alignment across stakeholders.
• High sense of ownership, capable of working independently, influencing team direction, and mentoring others.
• Strong background in operational excellence: monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
• Hands-on experience driving experimentation and A/B testing when launching new features, with a data-driven approach to measuring and iterating on outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Expertise in payment infrastructure, payment authorization flows, and reconciliation.
• Experience launching payment methods, optimizing for payment success rates, or managing payment costs.
• Experience designing or operating workflows with Temporal or similar workflow orchestration technologies.
• Track record of driving measurable impact through technical innovation in payments or financial systems.
• Thrive in an AI-first engineering environment, leveraging AI-powered tools as part of your workflow and contributing to the ongoing evolution of best practices that boost team productivity