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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.
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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 Customer Quality team ensures our Caper by Instacart hardware delivers reliable, delightful experiences at scale. We partner across Customer Success, Operations, RD, Suppliers, Manufacturing, and Product Management to rapidly resolve market issues, harden our designs, and raise the bar for quality and customer satisfaction.
We’re looking for a Sr. Hardware Field Quality Engineer (EE) to lead field quality for our electronics and electrical systems across deployed carts and kiosks. You will manage market-escape containment, drive root-cause analysis, and implement durable corrective and preventive actions that reduce cost of poor quality (COPQ) while boosting customer trust. This role is remote-friendly in the U.S., with a strong preference for Eastern Time and proximity to Cincinnati, OH or New York, NY for field and partner site visits.
About the Job
- Lead end-to-end triage of field quality issues for electronic and electrical subsystems (e.g., PCBAs, power, batteries, sensors, displays), from detection and containment to verified long-term corrective actions.
- Manage and mentor a small team of field and quality engineers, setting clear KPIs (e.g., DPPM, RMA rate, MTTR) and driving accountability across cross-functional stakeholders.
- Own the 8D/5-Why/FMEA process to identify true root causes, align on interim and permanent fixes, and prevent recurrence across the fleet and supply chain.
- Partner with RD, contract manufacturers, and suppliers to validate fixes (design, process, firmware) via DOE, bench validation, and on-device field trials; ensure changes are fully qualified and documented in PLM.
- Build and maintain a FRACAS and quality dashboard that turns data into action; quantify COPQ drivers and prioritize the highest-impact remediation work.
- Establish robust incoming, in-process, and end-of-line quality controls for EE components; influence test coverage, screening, and reliability guardrails for new and sustaining builds.
- Serve as the visible point of contact for escalations, communicating status and risk with clarity to customers and executives while coordinating rapid on-the-ground response.
- Support regulatory, safety, and EMC/EMI compliance considerations in field fixes and product changes in collaboration with compliance and engineering partners.
- Travel to customer sites, supplier factories, and labs to accelerate hands-on failure analysis and corrective action validation as needed.
About You
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
- 8+ years of experience in hardware quality, field quality, or reliability engineering focused on electronics/electrical systems for deployed products.
- 3+ years of experience leading engineers or technicians, including setting goals and developing talent.
- Proven ownership of 8D, 5-Why, FMEA, CAPA, and FRACAS processes with measurable improvements in DPPM/RMA/MTTR or similar KPIs.
- Hands-on debug skills using oscilloscopes, multimeters, and logic analyzers; ability to read schematics and perform board-level triage.
- Experience driving fixes across design, firmware, process, and test with contract manufacturers and suppliers.
- Working knowledge of EMC/EMI, electrical safety, and regulatory considerations for commercial electronics.
- Proficiency with PLM and issue-tracking tools (e.g., Arena/Agile, Jira) and strong data analysis skills using Excel or SQL.
- Ability to travel to customer and supplier sites as business needs dictate.
- Excellent cross-functional communication skills and comfort operating in a fast-paced, evolving environment.
- Professional working proficiency in Mandarin.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with connected retail/IoT hardware, kiosks, or robotics deployed at 1,000+ unit scale.
- Depth in power systems and battery technologies (charging, protection, BMS, thermal management).
- Background in reliability engineering (HALT/HASS, Weibull analysis, warranty analytics) and test automation.
- Six Sigma Green/Black Belt and/or ASQ Certified Quality Engineer (CQE).
- Experience establishing or maturing FRACAS and quality dashboards for executive and field visibility.
- Firmware/hardware interface debugging (e.g., I2C, SPI, UART, CAN, JTAG) and basic scripting (Python) for data or test tooling.
- Proximity to Cincinnati, OH or New York, NY and familiarity with Eastern Time operations.
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.
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 US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.
Canada
PR and US only