Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

ABOUT THE ROLE We're transforming the grocery industry, and we're looking for a talented Staff Software Engineer to join our Data Governance and Foundations Team. As a senior technical leader, you'll play a critical role in shaping the backbone of Instacart's data platform, driving innovation, and ensuring the reliability and scalability of our systems. WHAT YOU'LL DO You'll be responsible for owning the architecture and delivery of our open lakehouse foundation, governance and access patterns, and multi-engine compute strategy. This includes: - Translating Instacart's data strategy into an actionable multi-year architecture roadmap - Defining and delivering unified table formats, storage governance, and a multi-engine compute portfolio - Driving real-time and streaming infrastructure for critical use cases - Pioneering AI-native data infrastructure engineering by applying LLM/AI tools to the platform lifecycle - Elevating engineering excellence by leading architecture reviews, mentoring senior/staff engineers, and influencing hiring WHAT YOU'LL NEED To succeed in this role, you'll need: - 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) - Experience with distributed query/compute engines (e.g., Trino, Spark, ClickHouse), including performance tuning and production reliability - Proven ownership of major platform transitions or migrations delivered to production - Ability to build cost/benefit and TCO models for infrastructure investments WHY REMOTE Instacart is a Flex First team, which means you'll have the flexibility to choose where you do your best work—whether it's from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop. We value pragmatism, clarity, and impact, and we're committed to building a community that values flexibility and work-life balance. BENEFITS Instacart offers a competitive salary, comprehensive benefits package, and the opportunity to work with a talented team of engineers who are passionate about building innovative solutions. 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.