I
Instacart
Staff Software Engineer (Data Governance & Foundations)
Skills
SQL QueriesPythonData ScienceKafkaMachine LearningAIScaladbtApache AirflowComplianceRisk Management
2 months ago
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Important information
Contract type:
Permanent
Salary:
$221,000 – $279,500 / year
Location:
Remote, OR 97458, USA
Work mode:
Onsite
Published on:
17 August 2026
What they need
- 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—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
- Translate Instacart’s data strategy (e.g., monetization, federated access, real-time) into an actionable multi-year architecture roadmap; align with leadership while evolving the platform for scale, maturity, and cost efficiency
- Own the open lakehouse foundation: define and deliver unified table formats, storage governance, and a multi-engine compute portfolio (interactive, batch, streaming) that enables portability and prevents lock-in
- Drive real-time and streaming infrastructure for critical use cases (Ads, Fraud, ML): set 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—and partnering to embed AI-powered capabilities into the platform
- Elevate engineering excellence: lead architecture reviews, mentor senior/staff engineers, influence hiring, and clearly communicate complex trade-offs to both technical and executive audiences to ensure cross-org alignment
- 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- 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
- 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), including performance tuning and production reliability
- 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
- 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 (build vs. buy, migration design, risk management) delivered to production
- Experience designing platform-level governance controls and familiarity with compliance frameworks (e.g., SOX, CPRA, GDPR)
- FinOps experience optimizing data platform spend, including managing multi-million dollar infrastructure budgets and negotiating vendor contracts
- Deep SQL proficiency and strong skills in Python or Scala for systems-level development
- Experience with orchestration (e.g., Apache Airflow) and data transformation pipelines (e.g., dbt) in large-scale production environments
- Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
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