No Commute

OVERVIEW

Instacart’s Home & Cross-Retailer Search teams are responsible for how customers first discover where and what to shop: from the personalized Home experience to search across thousands of retailers and items. We own the systems that decide which retailers, items, and content to show, how fast they appear, and how well they match customer intent across platforms.

You will own the web platform architecture that powers discovery at scale: defining how our frontend systems are structured, how data flows from server to client, and how we make those experiences fast and reliable across platforms. This is a high-scope role that spans multiple product surfaces and requires close collaboration with engineering, product, design, and machine learning teams.

About the Job

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

We're looking for someone who is comfortable with ambiguity, has a bias toward action, and can influence technical strategy across organizational boundaries.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• Extensive experience in a senior/staff engineer role with a strong focus on web systems design and frontend architecture.
• Deep expertise in modern web technologies (React, TypeScript, Next.js etc.) with the ability to reason about end-to-end system architecture across client and server.
• Proven experience designing and operating large-scale web platforms supporting multiple product surfaces.
• Ability to dive deep into web performance optimization  rendering, Core Web Vitals, bundle size, caching strategies, and client-side data fetching.
• Experience leading engineering design reviews and influencing technical decisions across teams.
• Experience building web systems used and maintained by large engineering organizations (30+ engineers).
• Strong communication skills and the ability to influence technical strategy across organizational boundaries.
• Track record of mentoring engineers and driving long-term technical vision.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in Search, Recommendations, Personalization, or related discovery platforms is a huge plus.
• Experience with hybrid architectures, webview-based client systems, or cross-platform web rendering.
• Experience partnering closely with machine learning, product, and design teams.
• Experience building frontend platforms or design systems that support multiple feature teams at scale.
• Understanding of the online grocery, marketplace, or e-commerce ecosystem.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science or a related field.

#LI-Remote