Staff Software Engineer, Data Governance & Foundations
Leads architecture and delivery of Instacart’s open lakehouse foundation, governance controls, and multi-engine compute strategy. Requires 10+ years building production-scale data infrastructure or distributed systems, with expertise in lakehouse, streaming, and platform migrations.
221k – 280k/yr
Remote10+ YOEData Engineering
About the role
Responsibilities
Translate data strategy into a multi-year architecture roadmap covering monetization, federated access, real-time workloads, scale, maturity, and cost efficiency.
Own the open lakehouse foundation, including unified table formats, storage governance, and a multi-engine compute portfolio for interactive, batch, and streaming workloads.
Drive real-time and streaming infrastructure for Ads, Fraud, and ML use cases, including deployment patterns, SLAs, and operational practices.
Apply LLM and AI tools to platform development, automation, observability, and cost optimization.
Partner with teams to embed AI-powered capabilities into the data platform.
Lead architecture reviews, mentor senior and staff engineers, influence hiring, and communicate technical trade-offs to technical and executive audiences.
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 such as Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, or Hudi.
Experience with distributed query and compute engines such as Trino, Apache Spark, or ClickHouse, including performance tuning and production reliability.
Experience with event-driven and streaming infrastructure such as Apache Kafka or Apache Flink.
Proven ownership of major platform transitions or migrations delivered to production.
Ability to build cost-benefit and total-cost-of-ownership models for infrastructure investments and drive alignment through architecture documentation and strategy memos.
Nice-to-Haves
Experience designing platform-level governance controls and familiarity with SOX, CPRA, or GDPR.
FinOps experience optimizing data platform spend, including multi-million-dollar infrastructure budgets and vendor contract negotiations.
Deep SQL proficiency and strong Python or Scala skills for systems-level development.
Experience with Apache Airflow orchestration and dbt data transformation pipelines in large-scale production environments.
Bachelor's, master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
Compensation and Benefits
Base salary range: $221,000–$279,500 USD, dependent on permanent work location.
Eligible for a new-hire equity grant and annual refresh grants.
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