Staff Android Engineer, Caper 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’s Caper team is building the next generation of in-store retail technology—from smart carts to connected checkout experiences—powered by Android at the edge. We partner closely with hardware, firmware, payments, security, and cloud teams to deliver reliable, low-latency, and secure experiences that delight retailers, shoppers, and store associates. We’re hiring an Android Engineer to join the Caper Android Platform team. This is not a typical “app” role—you’ll be the technical authority across network reliability (including MQTT and connectivity management), payment terminal integrations, sensor processing, application architecture, and Android platform modernization. You’ll operate at platform depth while influencing product experiences at scale. You’ll help keep our in-store systems running with 99.9% uptime, shepherd cross-team initiatives from design to rollout, and mentor senior engineers across a broader org of Android developers. If you thrive in a fast-paced environment, enjoy working close to hardware, and love solving complex systems problems, this role is for you. This role is remote across the United States and Canada. About the Job • Own reliability and performance for the Android platform that powers Caper devices, setting standards and practices that drive 99.9%+ in-store uptime. • Design and harden connectivity layers, including MQTT-based messaging, Wi‑Fi/Bluetooth management, offline-first sync, and intelligent backoff/retry strategies. • Integrate and secure payment terminal workflows (e.g., EMV/contactless), partnering with vendors and internal security to deliver resilient, compliant transactions. • Build and optimize real-time data pipelines for sensors and peripherals (e.g., barcode, weight, camera, RFID), ensuring low-latency processing and fault tolerance. • Modernize Android architecture and tooling (Kotlin, Jetpack, multi-module, DI, testing, CI/CD), guiding migrations and establishing reusable platform libraries and SDKs. • Lead cross-team technical initiatives end-to-end—from RFCs and design reviews to staged rollouts and incident response—while mentoring senior engineers and raising the engineering bar. About You Minimum Qualifications • 8+ years of professional Android development experience using Kotlin, including Coroutines/Flows and Jetpack, with a track record of shipping and operating production systems or embedded Android products. • Hands-on expertise with edge-device networking and reliability, including MQTT or similar pub/sub, connectivity management (Wi‑Fi/Bluetooth), offline-first data sync, and production observability (crash/ANR monitoring, logging, metrics). • Proven experience integrating hardware peripherals on Android—such as payment terminals (EMV/contactless), barcode/RFID/sensors—and applying secure communication and device security fundamentals. • Demonstrated ability to drive cross-team technical initiatives and mentor other engineers; skilled at breaking down complex platform problems, leading design reviews, and running effective incident postmortems. • Proficiency with modern Android architecture and tooling (multi-module design, dependency injection with Dagger/Hilt, Gradle and CI/CD, performance profiling); Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience. Preferred Qualifications • Experience with AOSP internals, system services, HALs, or NDK for performance-critical components. • Payments domain expertise (terminal SDKs, kernel certifications, PCI DSS, P2PE) and familiarity with secure key management on Android. • Background in sensor fusion or real-time stream processing on Android; exposure to computer vision or on-device ML for edge scenarios. • Experience managing large fleets of managed Android devices (EMM/MDM), OTA updates, feature flags, staged rollouts, and canary strategies. • Success operating in mission-critical retail, point-of-sale, or similarly high-availability environments, including participation in on-call rotations. #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. Currently, we are only hiring in the following provinces: Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. 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 Canadian based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below. CAN$229,000—$241,500 CAD