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. [https://www.instacart.careers/flex-first]
OVERVIEW
Instacarts Data Infrastructure organization builds and operates the systems that
power our company’s data ecosystem, including a modern open data lakehouse on
Apache Iceberg, a multi-engine compute platform for stream and analytical
workloads, and self-serve tooling that helps Product, Data Science, ML, Ads,
Finance, and engineering teams move fast with data.
We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Data Governance and
Foundations Team. In this role, you’ll serve as a senior technical leader owning
the architecture and delivery of our open lakehouse foundation, governance and
access patterns, and multi-engine compute strategy—balancing today’s reliability
with the next three to five years of scale, maturity, and cost efficiency.
You’ll collaborate closely with engineering leadership and stakeholders across
Data Science, ML Platform, Ads Infrastructure, Finance Engineering, Product
Engineering, and Security. You’ll operate with a high degree of ownership in a
fast-paced environment where architectural decisions have real technical and
financial consequences. If you thrive on complex, high-scale challenges and
roll-up-your-sleeves execution, this is a chance to shape the backbone of
Instacart’s data platform.
Our stack includes technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Trino,
ClickHouse, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent,
Airflow, dbt, Delta Lake, Scala, Python, Postgres, and AWS. You’ll join a
focused team of 7 engineers that values pragmatism, clarity, and impact.
ABOUT THE JOB
* Translate Instacart’s data strategy (e.g., monetization, federated access,
real-time) into an actionable multi-year architecture roadmap; align with
leadership while evolving the platform for scale, maturity, and cost
efficiency.
* Own the open lakehouse foundation: define and deliver unified table formats,
storage governance, and a multi-engine compute portfolio (interactive, batch,
streaming) that enables portability and prevents lock-in.
* Drive real-time and streaming infrastructure for critical use cases (Ads,
Fraud, ML): set deployment patterns, SLAs, and operational practices that
balance performance, availability, and spend.
* Pioneer AI-native data infrastructure engineering by applying LLM/AI tools to
the platform lifecycle—accelerating development, automation, observability,
and cost optimization—and partnering to embed AI-powered capabilities into
the platform.
* Elevate engineering excellence: lead architecture reviews, mentor
senior/staff engineers, influence hiring, and clearly communicate complex
trade-offs to both technical and executive audiences to ensure cross-org
alignment.
ABOUT YOU
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS
* 10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating data
infrastructure or distributed systems at production scale.
* Hands-on expertise with modern data lakehouse architectures and open table
formats (e.g., Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi) and with distributed
query/compute engines (e.g., Trino, Spark, ClickHouse), including performance
tuning and production reliability.
* Experience with event-driven and streaming infrastructure (e.g., Kafka,
Flink) for real-time pipelines and serving systems.
* Proven ownership of major platform transitions or migrations (build vs. buy,
migration design, risk management) delivered to production.
* Ability to build cost/benefit and TCO models for infrastructure investments
and to drive alignment via clear architecture docs and strategy memos across
multiple teams and leadership levels.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
* Experience designing platform-level governance controls and familiarity with
compliance frameworks (e.g., SOX, CPRA, GDPR).
* FinOps experience optimizing data platform spend, including managing
multi-million dollar infrastructure budgets and negotiating vendor contracts.
* Deep SQL proficiency and strong skills in Python or Scala for systems-level
development.
* Experience with orchestration (e.g., Apache Airflow) and data transformation
pipelines (e.g., dbt) in large-scale production environments.
* Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering,
Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
#LI-Remote
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
[https://instacart.careers/flex-first/].
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 [https://instacart.careers/taste-of-instacart/].
For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are
listed below.
CA, NY, CT, NJ
$265,000—$279,500 USD
WA
$254,000—$268,000 USD
OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI
$243,000—$256,500 USD
All other states
$221,000—$233,000 USD
