Staff Android Engineer, Pick & Deliver
AI in this role
Lead Android Engineer shaping high-visibility mobile experiences for grocery picking and delivery operations at Instacart.
We're transforming the grocery industry
At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.
Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.
Instacart is a Flex First team
There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.
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
Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here.
Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.
For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.
How we rate this
Staff Android Engineer, Pick & Deliver at Instacart rates 10 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Little AI. AI is not part of the work.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.
Prepare for this job
A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a project where mobile development was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where android development was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where cross functional leadership was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where technical leadership was part of your work. What did you do?
- Walk me through how you've used Android in your day-to-day work.
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Mobile Development, Android Development, Cross Functional Leadership, Technical Leadership, and Android. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them — a tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
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