Description
At Instacart, we're transforming the grocery industry by delivering an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods. 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.
Overview
Instacart's Data Infrastructure organization builds and operates the systems that power our company's data ecosystem. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure 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.
Responsibilities
- Translate Instacart's data strategy into an actionable multi-year architecture roadmap
- Own the open lakehouse foundation: define and deliver unified table formats, storage governance, and a multi-engine compute portfolio
- Drive real-time and streaming infrastructure for critical use cases
- Pioneer AI-native data infrastructure engineering by applying LLM/AI tools to the platform lifecycle
- Elevate engineering excellence: lead architecture reviews, mentor senior/staff engineers, influence hiring, and clearly communicate complex trade-offs
Requirements
- 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
- Experience with event-driven and streaming infrastructure 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
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience designing platform-level governance controls and familiarity with compliance frameworks
- FinOps experience optimizing data platform spend
- Deep SQL proficiency and strong skills in Python or Scala for systems-level development
- Experience with orchestration and data transformation pipelines in large-scale production environments