Senior Software Engineer, Storage

Instacart

8h • $166,000 - $210,000 • Remote

About The Position

Instacart is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for their Storage team. This role involves working on large-scale cloud services and backend systems that power grocery delivery for millions of customers and integrate with major retailers. The engineer will focus on foundational engineering components for caching and storage, handling millions of requests daily in a collaborative environment. The Key-Value team specifically manages in-memory datastore infrastructure, requiring continuous 24/7 monitoring and uptime. Responsibilities include innovating automated monitoring and control-plane systems, supporting services like database proxies and backups, and working with cloud providers. The role also involves preparing for future growth through architectural shifts in distributed database systems, AI-powered monitoring, and tiered storage, with a focus on stability, productivity, and cost management visible at the executive level. This position offers the opportunity to shape the future of AI-powered commerce and make a significant impact in a fast-paced environment.

Requirements

• 4+ years of working experience as a software engineer in one or more large-scale cloud services or application development environment
• 1+ Years of hands-on experience, delivering large-scale solutions with an industry-recognized in-memory datastore (ideally Valkey or Redis)
• 1+ Years experience building cloud-based control-plane software
• Self-motivation and an enjoyment for a growth-oriented startup environment
• A strong sense of ownership that drives improvements for customers as well as automation and scale for the systems.
• The drive & ability to dive deep into technical challenges and champion root causes, solving problems correctly.
• Enjoy being highly productive, shipping code, reviewing others’ PRs and iteratively guiding code bases towards best practices and excellence.
• Able to scale yourself effectively via junior engineers and accelerate the team through effective designs, written & communication, delegation, establishing standards & best practices, code reviews.
• Strong ability to architect and design systems using common back-end Web technologies in a production environment
• An ability to balance a sense of urgency with shipping high quality and pragmatic solutions
• Experience working with a large codebase on a cross functional team, with a knack for driving alignment across teams and stakeholders
• Demonstrated capacity to take existing, complex solutions and evolve them to meet the changing needs of the business.

Nice To Haves

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, computer engineering, electrical engineering
• Familiarity with self-hosting core infrastructure
• Mentor to other software engineers, helping equip them and grow as software development professionals
• Like solving the kind of high-impact, org-wide problems that involve tackling abstract challenges and turning them into concrete programs that deliver successfully

Responsibilities

• Be a senior engineer in the team responsible for Storage platforms, with a large amount of ownership and autonomy for setting technical direction, reporting to an engineering manager.
• Work closely with other application engineering teams and internal stakeholders, owning a large part of the process from problem understanding to shipping the solution.
• Ship high quality, scalable and robust solutions with a sense of urgency.
• Suggest and drive high-impact initiatives related to in-memory storage solutions that unlock new innovations, accelerate application development, create resiliency & high-availability, and right-size storage needs company-wide.
• Innovate the automated monitoring & control-plane systems that run the clusters.
• Develop and maintain related supporting services like database proxies, snapshotting and backups.
• Work with major cloud providers.
• Support multiple environments for development and testing.
• Ensure data privacy and compliance at the infrastructure level.
• Invest in and prepare for Instacart’s future growth and success with forward-looking architectural shifts including distributed database systems, AI Agent-based monitoring and operations, tiered database storage.

Benefits

• Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work.
• Flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop
• New hire equity grant
• Annual refresh grants

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree