Engineering teams that use cutting-edge technologies

We maintain a complex, interdependent chain of technology.

We’ve doubled down on machine learning and data science in order to maintain a massive data catalog (the largest grocery catalog ever), build our customer and shopper apps, identify lost demand in our fulfillment chain, and solve a souped-up version of the classic traveling salesman problem. There is no shortage of interesting models to improve, algorithms to optimize, and problems to solve.

Millions of customers buy their groceries on Instacart. Our backend systems support tight integrations with the largest retailers in North America and our engineers are working to scale operations across our iOS, Android, and web applications. We currently use Rails, Ruby, Python, R, PostgreSQL 9.6, React 0.17, AWS, Docker, RabbitMQ, Sidekiq, Snowflake, PostgreSQL, Stripe, Twilio, Mapbox, and SiftScience, but don’t require folks to have experience with our stack. If you have a solid sense for basic languages and are eager to learn new ones, please reach out!

Be the first to apply brand new techniques and research.

We work with the best researchers, labs, and development teams in the world, and are often the first to apply new breakthroughs to a developer-ready product. We are built on cutting edge distributed technologies: IPFS, IPLD, LibP2P, DIDs, and blockchains. One critical role we play is to take cutting-edge technology and make it useful and usable for other developers.

We’ve built breakthrough innovations on top of this. Ceramic’s stream-processing design is the first to offer scalability through local-first consensus, flexibility through StreamType validation, and cross-network support through DID-based authentication.

We don’t require any particular experience of our engineers. Very few have worked with the tech we have, and it’s our pleasure to help new teammates get up to speed, learn, and become experts in their own right over time.

We’re modernizing the infrastructure for group benefits from start to finish.

Traditionally, the health insurance industry is prone to errors, wasting more than $17B in annually. With requirements like having to fax in forms, it’s also hard to know how safe your data is. Unlike others in the space who are operating on FTP files and fixed width mainframe formats, at Noyo we use a modern, API-driven cloud based infrastructure. Our cutting-edge technology allows transactions to process faster and groups to onboard more easily. It also makes data syncing between our customers and insurance carriers fast and easy.

While Python is our domain language of development, the coding challenge in the interview is still set up in a way that people with non-Python backgrounds can complete it. Our infrastructure is orchestrated using Kubernetes and we use Docker for deploying, but we’re open from a tech standpoint. If you’re interested in a certain language or part of the stack, but don’t have experience in it, that's not a blocker at all. We look for folks who are open to growing and learning new frameworks. In fact, individual teams are empowered to advocate for decisions around which tech to adopt, especially as we continue to grow.

We want what we build to be scalable and ensure that our tech is future proof and deliver best results by not using brittle approaches.

An example of how we leverage cutting-edge tech is by leveraging distributed messaging queues and our team is vertically integrated.

We build highly available and scalable backend infrastructure with a focus on performance in order to provide the best possible user experience to our products. In order to achieve this, we’re leveraging the latest and greatest technologies of a modern tech stack. Some examples of these technologies include: AWS Lambda, Apollo GraphQL, AWS Kinesis Streams, Prisma ORM, and AWS Aurora Postgres. We have a distributed architecture using a mix of point-to-point API requests between different lambda instances as well as using Kinesis Streams as our distributed messaging queue with resilient retry mechanisms from our integrations.

Some exciting projects that we’ll be working on in the future are building out infrastructure to become a featured bank for 3rd-party integrations, building a more flexible rewards pipeline, implementing systems which will allow us to offer a full suite of banking-related products and breaking out our services into a true microservice infrastructure.

We’re not just using the best-in-class technologies, we’re actively innovating and building on them.

Our infrastructure is orchestrated using Kubernetes, and is crucial to everything we do. We also use Cadence, Presto, and Flink for core functions of our system. You can listen/read about all of the details on our tech on our Software Engineering Daily podcast interview!

Ultimately, our goal is to create capabilities based on these tools that solve our customers’ problems in unique and specialized ways. Using cutting-edge technologies allows us to do so in a stress-free way; we can have predictable releases and build a lot of trust with our processes when we’re not getting slowed down by tech that’s constantly breaking or doesn’t work.