Staff Software Engineer at Instacart building data infrastructure and lakehouse platforms. Owns architecture for open table formats, multi-engine compute, and real-time streaming systems serving data science, ML, and ads teams.
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.
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.
#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.
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.