Staff Android Engineer, Pick & Deliver

Overview

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by helping people access the food they love while enabling retailers, brands, and shoppers to succeed. The Pick & Deliver organization builds the technology that powers critical in-store and delivery operations across the Instacart marketplace.

We are seeking an Android Engineer to serve as a technical lead within the Pick & Deliver organization. You will help shape and deliver high-visibility mobile experiences that support retailers throughout the process of picking customer orders, directly influencing the speed, quality, and reliability of the end-user experience.

This role offers the opportunity to work on complex, high-impact challenges across multiple retailer priorities, new picking models, market expansion, and platform-scale investments. You will partner closely with Product, Design, Backend Engineering, iOS Engineering, retailers, external vendors, and other internal teams to turn operational needs into reliable, intuitive mobile experiences.

The team works in a fast-paced environment with parallel feature development, retailer requests, and technical debt. Success requires strong ownership, sound technical judgment, and a willingness to collaborate, make decisions, and roll up your sleeves to solve problems that have immediate and meaningful impact.

About the Job

• Lead the technical direction and execution of Android experiences that support retailers and shoppers across all phases of picking an order.
• Design, build, test, and maintain high-quality Android applications using modern technologies including Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Coroutines, and RxJava.
• Partner with Product, Design, Backend Engineering, iOS Engineering, retailers, and external vendors to define solutions for complex operational and customer needs.
• Own projects from technical discovery through delivery, balancing immediate retailer priorities with long-term platform health, scalability, and maintainability.
• Improve application performance, reliability, observability, and developer experience through profiling, instrumentation, architectural improvements, and thoughtful technical debt reduction.
• Provide technical leadership across the Pick & Deliver organization by facilitating design discussions, mentoring engineers, establishing engineering best practices, and helping teams make clear, durable decisions.
• Contribute to a roadmap that includes new picking models, expansion to additional retailers and markets, and investments in the Android platform and operational scale.

This is a highly collaborative role in a changing environment. Priorities may shift as retailer needs, product opportunities, and operational challenges evolve, so you should be comfortable navigating ambiguity, communicating tradeoffs, and maintaining high standards while delivering against time-sensitive goals.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• At least 7 years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial experience developing and shipping Android applications.
• Strong proficiency in Kotlin and demonstrated experience with modern Android development practices, including Jetpack Compose, Coroutines, and reactive programming with RxJava or an equivalent framework.
• Experience leading the technical execution of complex, cross-functional software projects from design through production launch.
• Experience designing maintainable Android architectures and improving application performance, reliability, testing, monitoring, or observability.
• Demonstrated ability to partner effectively with Product, Design, Backend Engineering, iOS Engineering, and external stakeholders to deliver customer-facing products.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical decisions, align stakeholders, and communicate risks and tradeoffs clearly.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building mobile products for retail, logistics, fulfillment, delivery, workforce, or other operational environments.
• Experience supporting multiple product teams, retailers, markets, or high-priority initiatives at the same time.
• Experience with Android performance profiling, application startup optimization, crash reduction, instrumentation, or large-scale observability.
• Experience contributing to mobile platform strategy, shared components, developer tooling, or migration to modern Android technologies.
• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction across teams without direct authority.
• Experience working with external partners, vendors, or enterprise customers to understand operational needs and deliver reliable solutions.

#LI-Remote