Overview

The Page Builder team is part of Instacart’s Retailer Platform organization within Core Experience Engineering. We own the content infrastructure that powers every consumer-facing page at Instacart—from the storefront homepage a shopper lands on, to the digital flyer they browse, the loyalty rewards they redeem, and the seasonal campaigns that drive purchases. Our systems operate at meaningful scale: the Content Management Domain (CMD) stores, resolves, and renders 150K+ active placements across 125+ format types and serves approximately 7 million placement fetches per day at roughly 200 RPS for 100+ retail partners.

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to lead high-impact platform initiatives that accelerate every team building on Instacart’s content layer. You will architect and drive the extraction of CMD from a Ruby monolith into a dedicated Go service, design proto-first API contracts used by many partner teams, and deliver low-latency, highly reliable services with clear SLOs. You’ll also shape a new composable content architecture that replaces 125+ hardcoded placement types with a single extensible type built on React components and Liquid templates—dramatically speeding up time-to-value for enterprise retailers and internal teams.

This role is a force multiplier across Instacart. You’ll collaborate closely with Shopping/URSA, Feeds, Growth, Loyalty, and Ads to evolve CMD into a dependable, well-documented platform. You’ll help define our AI-native future by exposing Page Builder capabilities as MCP-compatible endpoints so AI agents can create, preview, QA, and publish pages end-to-end. If you thrive in fast-paced, high-ownership environments and enjoy rolling up your sleeves to solve complex, high-scale platform problems, you’ll feel right at home here. This role is open to candidates based in Canada (remote).

About the Job

• Lead the CMD service extraction: architect and drive the migration of our Content Management Domain from a Ruby monolith into a dedicated Go service using a strangler-pattern approach; design proto-first API contracts (e.g., v2/GetPlacements), implement concurrent visibility condition evaluation via goroutines, and establish formal SLOs (99.9% availability, under 30ms P90 placement fetch) for a system handling 7M daily requests across 15+ consumer surfaces.
• Design composable extensibility: replace 125+ hardcoded placement format types with a single composable type built on React components and Liquid templates to eliminate weeks of full-stack engineering per new format and unlock enterprise retailer customization at scale.
• Shape the AI-native content platform: expose Page Builder capabilities as MCP-compatible endpoints, enabling AI agents to create, preview, QA, and publish pages end-to-end; define how LLM-powered content creation, AI carousels, and agentic page management integrate with CMD.
• Drive cross-team architecture: own the technical relationship with Shopping/URSA, Feeds, Growth, Loyalty, and Ads; lead API contract design, coordinate migration sequencing, and ensure CMD evolves as a reliable, well-documented platform that other teams can confidently build on.
• Mentor and multiply the team: raise the engineering bar across Page Builder by mentoring engineers, establishing robust design patterns, and contributing to a culture where AI-assisted development is the default.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong backend engineering skills with production experience in Go, Ruby, Java, or similar systems-level languages.
• Proven track record designing and leading large-scale technical projects (e.g., service extractions, platform migrations, new system architectures consumed by multiple teams).
• Experience building and operating high-throughput, low-latency backend services (handling millions of daily requests, sub-100ms latency targets, formal SLOs).
• Experience with platform-focused API design (gRPC/Protobuf, GraphQL, or REST) consumed by downstream teams.
• Demonstrated ability to drive technical decisions across team boundaries, including leading design reviews, negotiating API contracts, and coordinating migrations.
• Experience mentoring engineers and elevating team-wide technical standards.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including authorship of technical design docs and presenting architecture to leadership and cross-functional partners.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background with content management systems, page builders, or CMS infrastructure (content modeling, placement/component resolution, template rendering).
• Hands-on Go experience, including goroutines, channels, and building high-concurrency services.
• Monolith-to-microservice migration experience using patterns like strangler fig, dual-reads, or gradual traffic shifting.
• Experience building self-serve tooling for business users (merchants, retailers, marketers) where extensibility and reliability directly impact customer revenue.
• Experience with multi-tenant platform architecture serving diverse customers with shared infrastructure.
• Familiarity with AI/LLM integration patterns: MCP (Model Context Protocol), agent-based workflows, AI-generated content pipelines, or prompt-to-UI.
• Frontend experience with React/TypeScript (helpful, not required) given our span from backend infrastructure to WYSIWYG editor tooling.
• Experience at companies with analogous products or platforms (e.g., Shopify, Contentful, Builder.io, Webflow, DoorDash, Meta, Amazon).
• Experience with Protobuf/gRPC and proto-first API design.
• Familiarity with e-commerce or marketplace platforms, including retailer needs, storefront customization, and enterprise SaaS dynamics.

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