Software Engineer

Who you are

• You work well in ambiguity, like owning features end to end, and want the surface area of a fast-growing business alongside the depth of hard systems problems
• 3+ years of experience building and operating production backend services
• Strong API design and distributed-systems fundamentals, with fluency in a backend language such as Go, Ruby, or Python
• Demonstrated track record of shipping features end to end with solid testing, observability, and operational ownership
• Experience debugging across service boundaries and collaborating across cross-functional teams
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience in ad tech, retail media, or other publisher- or partner-facing platforms
• Familiarity with event streaming and reliability patterns at scale (e.g., Kafka, dead-letter queues, idempotent processing)
• Cloud infrastructure experience with AWS or GCP, including data or measurement-adjacent systems
• Experience with data reconciliation, attribution, or catalog and entity mapping
• Experience building partner- or customer-facing APIs, including documentation, error contracts, and integration test coverage

What the job involves

• As a Software Engineer II on Carrot Ads, you will independently build and ship features across the publisher-facing stack: the Connect / Carrot Ads API, publisher serving inputs, reporting, and the tooling partners use to run their ad businesses
• You will write efficient, observable, well-tested code, own what you ship through production and on-call, and work as an away team into shared systems when a feature needs changes there
• This is a high-visibility role inside one of Instacart's top growth areas, with real opportunity to own meaningful surfaces early in your career here
• Build and ship publisher-facing features end to end across Storefront, Storefront Pro, and API partners — including API endpoints, serving inputs, reporting views, and configuration tooling that partners depend on daily
• Extend the Connect / Carrot Ads API with clear contracts, robust event handling and dead-letter recovery, integration tests, and self-serve documentation that makes partner onboarding faster and more reliable
• Build the retailer control surface: relevance and quality-score inputs, reserve pricing, ad-load controls, and the trade-off signals retailers use to tune performance on their own sites
• Strengthen reporting and data integrity across partner systems — including attribution, catalog and product-ID mapping, reconciliation, and automated health checks that keep partner data trustworthy
• Raise reliability by helping define and meet partner SLAs, improving observability, reducing incident frequency and time to recovery, and contributing to a unified partner-health monitoring layer
• Debug partner-facing serving and reporting issues, tracing root causes across shared serving, measurement, and quality systems
• Collaborate across Product, Enterprise Solutions, and the horizontal Ads teams — including Serving, Measurement, Ads Quality, and Ads Manager — to land work that spans multiple stacks
• Use AI-assisted developer tools to move faster without lowering the bar on quality or security