Senior Software Engineer II, Ads Data Solutions Engineering

Instacart

8d • $192,000 - $242,500 • Remote

About The Position

The Ads Data Solutions Engineering team builds core capabilities for Instacart’s off-platform advertising, secure data collaboration through cleanrooms, automated taxonomy management, and supporting platform foundations. The Senior Software Engineer II will co-own the technical roadmap, modernize data solutions infrastructure, scale off-platform integrations and measurement capabilities, extend cleanroom collaboration, and automate taxonomy change management. This senior technical leader will design and ship scalable, data-intensive systems, drive cross-team execution, and raise engineering standards in partnership with Product, Data Science, Data Platform, and Governance teams. The role spans off-platform, data collaboration, Ads Taxonomy, platform modernization, and AI initiatives. It is an individual-contributor technical lead role with no direct reports, including mentoring L4/L5 engineers and helping define a future on-call model and SLOs.

Responsibilities include leading architecture for reusable systems; improving core abstractions, testing, CI/CD, observability, and cost efficiency; and driving initiatives and stakeholder alignment. The engineer will expand external advertising integrations and measurement pipelines; extend cleanroom orchestration and governance; improve taxonomy intake and release workflows; contribute to platform tooling, on-call, and SLO strategy; and use AI-assisted tools in development while establishing team workflows and identifying internal automation opportunities. The role also emphasizes phased delivery, product quality, security-by-design, data governance, privacy compliance, mentorship, and cross-functional collaboration.

Instacart describes itself as a Flex First team: employees may choose to work from home, an office, or a coffee shop, with regular in-person events. The position is remote. Occasional trips to the Toronto office are mentioned. Compensation varies by permanent work location; U.S. base pay ranges are $230,000–$242,500 for CA, NY, CT, and NJ; $220,000–$232,000 for WA; $211,000–$222,500 for OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, and HI; and $192,000–$202,500 for all other states. The role is eligible for a new-hire equity grant and annual refresh grants. The posting refers candidates to Instacart’s benefits offerings but does not list specific benefits.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of software engineering experience delivering and operating large-scale backend/data systems; the posting notes typically 10+ years for this level.
• Experience leading cross-team projects and architectural decisions.
• Strong Python skills and proficiency in at least one of Ruby or Go.
• Experience with services/APIs, including REST or gRPC, and third-party API integrations.
• Experience building data pipelines with DBT and Airflow, using Spark/Databricks, and advanced SQL and performance tuning.
• Experience with Snowflake and AWS, cost-aware design, workflow orchestration such as Temporal, and event-driven patterns.
• Experience with ad-tech/programmatic and measurement integrations; cleanrooms such as Snowflake DCR, shares/listings; and identity/matching such as UID2 or RampID and deconfliction.
• Working knowledge of privacy and compliance practices, including GDPR/CCPA, in data workflows.
• Experience with CI/CD, containers, test strategy, observability tools such as Datadog, incident readiness, and SLO thinking.
• Recent hands-on use of AI-assisted development tools, such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or OpenAI-based assistants, to improve speed and quality.
• Experience defining reusable AI prompts/workflows for team use and contributing to AI-enabled internal tools or automation.
• Ability to evaluate when to apply AI versus deterministic systems, with familiarity in evaluation, guardrails, and security/privacy implications of AI usage.
• Clear technical writing, stakeholder management, and the ability to drive consensus and unblock execution.

Nice To Haves

• Direct experience with UID2/TTD integrations, Roku/PubMatic/NBCU, or Meta Advanced Analytics/Google ADH pipelines.
• Experience with catalog/taxonomy, entity lineage, or custom hierarchy systems.
• Experience with Snowflake governance patterns and partner data collaboration at scale.
• Vendor/partner management and external API certification program experience.
• Experience building AI-powered internal tools such as Slackbots or data assistants.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture for reusable, scalable systems across off-platform workflows, cleanrooms, taxonomy automation, and the Ads Data Solutions Platform.
• Evolve core abstractions, testing, CI/CD, observability, and cost efficiency, and drive infrastructure modernization.
• Propose and drive initiatives on behalf of engineering management, align stakeholders, and manage dependencies.
• Expand and harden integrations with external advertising platforms; design privacy-forward activation and identity workflows; reduce reliance on third-party intermediaries; and build measurement ingestion pipelines for reach, frequency, and conversion signals.
• Extend cleanroom orchestration and governance tooling, including multi-cleanroom support and policy enforcement; develop reusable query templates and partner configurations; optimize pipelines; and scale secure data collaboration deployment and management.
• Lead Ads Taxonomy intake automation across UI and backend and improve release workflows to reduce manual effort and cycle time.
• Support platform modernization and developer tooling improvements, and contribute to an on-call and SLO strategy.
• Use AI-assisted tools for design, coding, tests, and documentation; define reusable team prompt patterns and workflows; and identify AI opportunities in internal tools and operations.
• Translate ambiguous requirements into pragmatic phases such as POC, pilot, and production, with clear SLAs/SLOs.
• Champion security-by-design, data governance, and privacy compliance, including GDPR/CCPA, across pipelines.
• Mentor engineers up to L5 and set code quality and review standards.
• Build partnerships across Ads Manager, Measurement Science, Data Platform, Privacy/Legal, and external platforms.
• Help define future operational excellence standards and the on-call model as the organization scales.

Benefits

• The role is eligible for a new-hire equity grant and annual refresh grants.
• The posting refers to Instacart benefits offerings but does not specify individual benefits.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed