Senior Staff Software Engineer at Instacart building the core data platform. Owns multi-year architecture roadmap for storage, compute, streaming, and analytics infrastructure serving millions of customers processing petabytes daily.
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.
About the Role
Instacart's backend systems serve millions of customers every year, processing petabytes of data daily to power everything from personalized grocery recommendations to real-time fraud detection and advertiser measurement. As Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Data Infrastructure team, you will set the technical direction for the data platform that underpins the entire company’s data strategy — from the storage and compute layer to streaming infrastructure, analytics tooling, and governance systems.
This is a role for a systems thinker who thrives at the intersection of deep technical depth and company-level strategic impact. You will define the multi-year architecture roadmap for our core data platform, drive major platform investment decisions, and operate as a thought leader both internally across engineering leadership and externally within the data infrastructure community. Your work will directly influence how Instacart makes decisions at scale and shape the platform economics of one of the most data-intensive technology companies in grocery commerce.
About the Team
The Data Infrastructure team builds and operates the systems that power Instacart’s data ecosystem — a modern data lakehouse built on Apache Iceberg, a multi-engine compute platform spanning stream processing and analytical query engines, and self-serve tooling that enables Product, Data Science, ML, Ads, Finance, and other engineering teams to move fast with data.
We balance two mandates: maintaining a highly reliable production data platform serving the business today, and architecting the infrastructure that will serve it for the next three to five years. We operate in a world of significant scale and material infrastructure spend, where architectural decisions carry both technical and financial consequences. Some of the core technologies in our stack include:
Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Trino, ClickHouse, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent, Airflow, dbt, Delta Lake, Scala, Python, Postgres, and AWS.
The team operates with a high degree of ownership and autonomy. You will work closely with engineering leadership, data science, ML platform, ads infrastructure, finance engineering, and senior stakeholders across the organization.
ABOUT THE JOB
What You’ll Do
Minimum Qualifications
Preferred Qualifications
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. Currently, we are only hiring in the following provinces: Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia.
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 Canadian based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.