Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience

Instacart

17h•Remote

About The Position

Instacart’s Developer Experience team builds the frameworks, tooling, and platforms that enable engineers to ship high-quality software quickly and safely. We remove friction from the inner loop of development, streamline CI/CD, and champion engineering excellence across the company. You will join a 6-person Developer Experience team within a ~50-person platform organization, partnering closely with product engineering, infrastructure, and security to deliver reliable, scalable solutions that elevate productivity and quality. If you love tackling complex, high-leverage technical problems and shaping how engineers work every day, this role offers significant scope and impact. This role is remote within Canada.

Requirements

5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
3+ years of experience developing developer tooling, build systems, CI/CD pipelines, or internal platforms.
Proficiency in at least one of the following: Go, Python, or TypeScript, with strong software design and code review skills.
Hands-on experience with modern CI/CD systems and build tooling (e.g., GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins, Bazel, Pants, or similar).
Experience shipping and operating services on a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes or equivalent).
Demonstrated track record improving engineering KPIs such as build/test cycle time, flaky test rate, or deployment frequency.
Strong collaboration and communication skills with a history of partnering across infra, security, and product engineering.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience with monorepo strategies and advanced build/test optimizations (e.g., remote caching, test sharding, hermetic builds).
Background in building internal developer platforms or portals (e.g., Backstage) and defining golden paths for service development.
Deep familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and platform automation (e.g., Terraform, Helm) and service networking (e.g., gRPC, Protobuf).
Strong observability skills (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana) and a data-driven approach to prioritization and measurement.
Experience leading multi-team initiatives in a fast-paced environment and influencing roadmaps without direct authority.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and evolve core developer platforms and tooling, including build systems, CI/CD pipelines, test infrastructure, and code quality workflows.
Drive measurable improvements to engineering velocity and reliability by reducing build and test times, eliminating flaky steps, and hardening developer workflows.
Own critical roadmap areas end-to-end: define goals and success metrics, partner with stakeholders, implement solutions, and operationalize with robust observability.
Establish and maintain guardrails for secure-by-default development (e.g., automated checks, policy enforcement, and golden paths) in partnership with security and infra.
Lead cross-functional initiatives that span multiple teams, guiding architectural decisions, documenting patterns, and maintaining high standards for engineering quality.
Mentor fellow engineers, promote best practices, and contribute to a culture of continuous improvement, transparency, and thoughtful experimentation.