Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience

OVERVIEW

About the Role

The Developer Experience team at Instacart plays a crucial role in making software development easier and more productive. Our customers are the engineers at the heart of Instacart, tackling diverse projects spanning frontend and backend changes, mobile apps, machine learning, and AI-driven innovations. We collaborate closely with various infrastructure and engineering teams to create and refine tools that streamline development workflows. This covers everything from developer onboarding to daily development challenges and testing. Our metrics obsession helps us measure and minimize the lead time from conceptualization to successful deployment in Production.

About the Team

As Instacart evolves, our Developer Experience team is committed to advancing engineering practices to enhance efficiency and quality. We're refining our code review process by accelerating builds and feedback, incorporating AI for preliminary analysis, and streamlining reviewer assignments. Simultaneously, we're leveraging advanced AI in unit testing to deepen coverage and detect issues earlier. Our focus also includes improving the stability and speed of builds and optimizing the local development environment to boost productivity and satisfaction among developers.

What's New and Exciting:
We are extending our local development CLI tool (Bento) capabilities to include advanced build system management and leveraging AI to automate and simplify the development lifecycle. Our new features focus on:

• Owning and Enhancing the Build System: Develop and maintain robust build systems within Bento to support scalable and efficient software deployment.
• Incorporating AI Tools: Integrate AI technologies to streamline workflows, enhance code quality through automated reviews and testing, and reduce the manual burden on developers.

About the Job

• Collaborate with team members to enhance Bento, focusing on scalability, usability, and the integration of AI tools.
• Work on the orchestration of on-demand and ephemeral CI environments that allow for integration and E2E tests before merging PRs. This proactive approach shifts quality assurance earlier in the development process (“shift left”), ensuring that only the most stable, well-tested changes are merged into the master branch.
• Continuously engage with metrics to drive improvements in our processes and outcomes, directly enhancing developer productivity and satisfaction.
• Maintain and improve the build systems to allow for 1000+ developers to get changes tested, built and deployed faster.
• A software engineer with a passion for improving developer workflows and a keen interest in the latest technologies, including AI and machine learning.
• Experienced in developing or maintaining build systems, with a strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines.
• A collaborative team player who thrives in an innovative and fast-paced environment.

Join us in making software development a delightful experience for all engineers at Instacart while pushing the boundaries of traditional development practices!

ABOUT YOU

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of software development experience
• A strong sense of ownership, self-motivated and enjoy the fast pace of a startup environment
• Previous experience building and maintaining a robust build system using Jenkins, BuildKite, Gitlab or CircleCI
• Strong knowledge of Go, Ruby, or Python and experience with AWS Infrastructure 
• Ability to balance a sense of urgency with shipping high quality and pragmatic solutions

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering OR equivalent work experience