Support Engineer (Contractor)

Overview

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 opportunities 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 your life's best work, come join our table.

About the Role

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.

Instacart’s goal has always been to support grocers and give retailers of all sizes an edge in an
increasingly competitive industry while creating a seamless experience for customers and
shoppers. With Caper.ai, we combine online and offline shopping to create an entirely new
in-store shopping experience for both customers and Instacart shoppers.

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.

Caper.ai is a subsidiary of Instacart and an AI company. It leverages cutting-edge AI and
computer vision technology to provide the store with an autonomous shopping experience.
Its product, the Caper Cart - an AI-powered smart cart equipped with scales, sensors,
touchscreens, and computer vision technology, is the cornerstone of the Instacart Platform
Connected Stores initiative.
Caper builds smart shopping carts powered by deep learning and computer vision to enable a
seamless grab-and-go retail experience. Caper’s unique technology is a plug-and-play solution
that does not require retail store renovation, operational overhaul, heavy computing, and endless image labeling & training. Retailers purchase intelligent shopping carts, and the entire store is upgraded with cashier-less capabilities!

Caper is one of the fastest-growing retail automation technology products in the market, costs
less than 1% of our competition’s infrastructure, and is already widely adopted in the] marketplace. Our cross-functional and durable Product team solves hard customer & business problems in ways our customers love.

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.