Staff Software Engineer, Partnerships

Overview

The Partnerships team sits within Instacart’s Core Experience organization and is responsible for how Instacart shows up inside partner ecosystems like Airbnb, Grubhub, The New York Times, and the next wave of strategic partners. Partnerships is an area where the strategic importance and business impact are high and rising.

As a Staff Software Engineer, Partnerships, you will set the technical direction for how we build and scale Embedded Instacart over the next several years. The architecture is still in relatively early stages and yours to help shape - from making new partner integrations turnkey, to defining platform primitives that make future launches fast, resilient, and consistent. You’ll work across a broad backend surface area (identity, cart, checkout, external apis, etc) while partnering closely with iOS, Android, Web, and adjacent teams to deliver cohesive experiences for Instacart customers, partners and their end users.

This is a highly visible, cross-org role with meaningful leadership scope. You’ll have direct partner-engineering exposure (eng-to-eng with teams at Airbnb, Grubhub, NYT, and others), influence roadmaps across Identity, Payments, Cart, Checkout, Fulfillment, Retailer Engineering, Mobile Platform, Growth, and Marketing, and play a key part in determining how Instacart ships partnerships over the next 12+ months and beyond.

About the Job

• Lead architecture for the Partnerships platform
• Own and evolve the technical architecture across identity, cart, checkout, attribution, and partner orchestration for Embedded Instacart.
• Define clear boundaries and contracts between partner-facing and internal systems so that new partnerships can be launched quickly without bespoke one-off solutions.
• Drive the transition from a broad-but-shallow backend surface to a coherent, well-factored platform that is easy to extend and reason about.
• Platformize partnership constructs
• Identify repeatable integration patterns across partners and convert them into reusable building blocks (APIs, services, workflows, configuration, and tooling).
• Reduce and rationalize per-partner customization by making differences explicit, intentional, and configuration-driven where possible.
• Partner with product and partner teams to define SLAs, integration playbooks, and technical standards that keep launches fast, smooth, and predictable.
• Drive cross-org alignment and delivery
• Work closely with Identity, Payments, Cart, Checkout, Fulfillment, Retailer Engineering, Mobile Platform, Growth, and Marketing to align partnership requirements with core platform roadmaps.
• Represent the Partnerships technical perspective in cross-functional forums, ensuring partner needs are anticipated in shared systems and that we avoid fragmented one-off solutions.
• Translate ambiguous partner and business goals into concrete, staged technical plans that the team can execute against reliably.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience as a software engineer building and operating large-scale backend or full-stack systems, including significant time in a technical lead or Staff-level capacity.
• Proven track record designing and evolving platforms or integration frameworks (e.g., partner ecosystems, B2B platforms, or multi-tenant systems) where reuse and clear contracts are critical.
• Deep experience with distributed systems and APIs: service boundaries, data modeling, reliability, observability, and performance for user-facing flows like identity, cart, checkout, or payments.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and uplevel engineers across levels (L4–L6 equivalent), including guiding them through system design, tradeoffs, and execution in ambiguous problem spaces.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, with experience partnering closely with product, design, data, and external or partner engineering teams to ship complex, multi-surface features.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience architecting or leading partner integrations at a consumer or platform company (e.g., marketplaces, subscriptions, payments, content, or logistics), ideally across multiple partners or domains.
• Comfort working in environments where strategy, architecture, and execution are tightly coupled — you enjoy both setting the long-term direction and getting into enough detail to unblock the team.
• Prior experience in a highly cross-functional role requiring regular interaction with external stakeholders (e.g., partner engineers, business development, legal) and the ability to translate between business and technical constraints.