Staff Android Engineer, Caper

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing innovative in-store retail technology solutions. The Staff Android Engineer will be responsible for ensuring the reliability and performance of the Android platform that powers Caper devices, as well as leading cross-team technical initiatives and mentoring other engineers.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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