Overview

The Marketing Enablement & Technology (MET) team sits within Instacart's Marketing organization, building the systems, APIs, and data pipelines powering Instacart's Paid Marketing channels—one of our most substantial growth levers. Operating at the intersection of Marketing, Product, and Engineering, we own the platforms behind campaign feeds, audience targeting, event pipelines, and QA automation. We're seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Paid MarTech pod to architect and scale backend services and ETL processes enabling marketing campaign execution, conversion tracking, and third-party integrations across Paid Social, Display, SEM, Online Video, Linear Television, and Streaming Audio. You'll lead projects end-to-end, drive technical direction, mentor engineers, and partner closely with Marketing, Operations, and Product leadership to shape technical and product strategy. 

About the Job

• Lead complete projects independently across backend services, APIs, and data pipelines, defining experimentation, development, and rollout strategies across multiple systems with minimal guidance.
• Architect scalable, robust solutions for performance, reliability, and cost efficiency, applying deep technical knowledge to design systems that handle high-throughput marketing operations.
• Drive technical improvements by identifying and solving deeper underlying problems, designing appropriate abstractions to simplify complexity and promote reusability across the codebase.
• Partner directly with Marketing and Product stakeholders to influence features and requirements, bringing strong technical perspective while making well-reasoned trade-offs between complexity, business value, and delivery timelines.
• Mentor junior engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, and onboarding support, while contributing to team productivity through process improvements and automation.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 5–8 years of software engineering experience with expert-level proficiency in Python for building scalable backend services, APIs, and data pipelines.
• Proven track record of leading complete projects end-to-end, including architecture design, implementation, experimentation, and production rollout.
• Deep expertise with data integration technologies (Snowflake, SQL, ETL processes) and workflow orchestration tools (Airflow, DBT).
• Demonstrated ability to design for performance, scalability, and robustness, with experience implementing comprehensive observability solutions (logging, metrics, tracing).
• Strong product thinking with ability to research problems deeply, influence product direction, and make strategic trade-offs balancing technical and business considerations.
• Excellent communication skills with proven ability to mentor engineers, drive cross-team alignment, and translate technical concepts for diverse stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience architecting and implementing automation frameworks and reusable abstractions that improve team productivity and system extensibility.
• Advanced knowledge of ad platform APIs (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Snapchat Ads) and conversion tracking mechanisms at scale.
• Deep understanding of digital marketing operations and performance marketing KPIs (ROAS, LTV, CAC, CPA) with ability to identify technical opportunities that drive business impact.
• Experience with cloud cost optimization, chaos engineering, and disaster recovery planning.
• Track record of managing technical debt strategically and leading legacy system modernization efforts.
• Experience with security-by-design principles and leading incident response for production systems.
• Demonstrated ability to leverage AI tools for significant productivity improvements and contribute to AI-assisted development infrastructure.

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