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InstacartInstacartUnited States

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.
  • Market-competitive compensation and benefits.
  • Remote work under Instacart's Flex First policy.

Skills

apache icebergapache flinktrinoClickHouseapache kafkaSparkSnowflakeDatabricksapache airflowdbtDelta LakeScalaPythonSQLAWS
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