Support Engineer (Contractor)

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

As a Software Support Engineer, you will provide enterprise-level technical assistance to our customers and colleagues. You will help support ad-hoc onsite support engineering needs as cart shipments arrive to ensure a high-quality customer experience when we deliver the carts to customers. Your primary responsibility will be to assist in the installation of software applications and establish device configurations as thousands of carts arrive at our warehouse.

You will serve as the principal point of contact, ensuring that we have a comprehensive end-to-end provisioning process in place to meet our business needs. This role requires someone who can be an innovative problem-solver, be able to adapt to new processes and handle a large number of requests in an efficient manner.

To be successful in this role, you should have extensive experience in resolving customer-related issues, creating scripts to automate deployment and support-related operations, configuring hardware and software for different types of devices (e.g., Linux, Android), and providing immediate support. Meanwhile, you must also be an innovator, learner, and team player, which helps create and maintain updated documentation and streamline processes. This role is a three-month contract and will have variable hours based on when cart shipments arrive.

About the Job

You will:

• Support our warehouse carts provisioning and all necessary software installation
• Coordinate with our logistics team to deliver carts to our customers on-time
• Support documentation of troubleshooting steps and instructions to ensure a consistent, efficient, and standardized process.
• Collaborate with warehouse technicians and offer technical guidance to non-technical team members using easily understandable language to resolve issues together effectively.
• Implement the automation tools in dynamic settings, manage code updates under version control, and write clear commit messages
• Use Jira for ticket tracking, Confluence for documentation, and OpsGenie for tracking on-call coordination under an agile software development setting.
• Navigate cloud computing platforms like GCP and AWS, and use or learn various services within these platforms, especially knowledge of monitoring and analyzing logs, and managing assets in storage service.
• Set up and configure multiple VPN solutions to establish remote connections to our products and support our clients.
• Use Android debug bridge (ADB) to identify root causes and troubleshoot errors reading through Android logs and provide technical advice to clients or colleagues.
• Have experience testing RESTful API endpoints using tools like Postman or gRPC endpoints using Kreya, and should have some basic knowledge of both relational databases like PostgreSQL and non-relational databases like MongoDB.
• Share technical expertise gained from on-the-ground operations with the engineering and QA teams to enhance their performance.

About You
Minimum Qualifications

• Based in Canada near our Toronto warehouse location, and be able to travel to the warehouse sometimes for support.
• At least 2+ years of software support experience or related areas.
• Experience supporting hardware products (e.g., robotics, consumer electronics, telecom equipment) and solid system-level experience, especially troubleshooting client-side Issues.
• Experience in programming or scripting to automate/build etc (Shell or Python preferred).
• Experience with device configuration and new image/package deployments.
• Experience with Linux and Android OS (e.g., package managers, rooting, configuration, driver installation, log managers).
• Experience with enterprise communications and ticket management.
• Strong sense of ownership and ability to deliver tasks on time.
• Fast learner, and great problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Excellent debugging and optimization skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent work experience.
• Experience in utilizing cloud services like AWS or GCP.