Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

ABOUT THE ROLE We're seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure to join our Data Governance and Foundations Team at Instacart. As a critical member of our team, you will play a key role in shaping the backbone of our data platform, driving architectural decisions, and collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver a modern open data lakehouse on Apache Iceberg. WHAT YOU'LL DO In this role, you will: - Translate Instacart's data strategy into an actionable multi-year architecture roadmap, aligning with leadership and evolving the platform for scale, maturity, and cost efficiency. - Own the open lakehouse foundation, defining and delivering unified table formats, storage governance, and a multi-engine compute portfolio that enables portability and prevents lock-in. - Drive real-time and streaming infrastructure for critical use cases, setting 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. - Elevate engineering excellence by leading architecture reviews, mentoring senior/staff engineers, influencing hiring, and clearly communicating complex trade-offs to both technical and executive audiences. WHAT YOU'LL NEED To be successful in this role, you will 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) and with distributed query/compute engines (e.g., Trino, Spark, ClickHouse). - 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 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. WHY REMOTE At Instacart, we're a Flex First team, which means we prioritize flexibility and work-life balance. Our employees have the freedom to choose where they do their best work, whether that's from home, an office, or a coffee shop, while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. BENEFITS Instacart offers a competitive salary and a comprehensive benefits package, including medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) matching, and paid time off.