Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

Instacart • San Francisco, CA

22h • Remote

About The Position

Instacart’s backend systems power grocery shopping for millions of customers and integrate closely with the largest retailers in North America. Our engineers work on complex scaling challenges while building the platforms and features that support millions of daily requests in a highly collaborative environment. The Data Platform team develops a modern data platform that processes petabytes of data each day and supports Product, Data Science, and ML teams across the company. As a small team with many initiatives in early stages, you’ll have meaningful ownership and influence across system design, technical decisions, and execution. Your work will help shape Instacart’s data strategy and the foundation of our data lake. Our stack continues to evolve and includes technologies such as Scala, Python, Spark, Snowflake, Kafka, Airflow, and modern data lake technologies. You’ll have the opportunity to deepen existing skills or learn new ones alongside an experienced team.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in a similar field or environment
• Strong knowledge of data infrastructure technologies in production environments (e.g., Python, Scala, Kafka, Airflow, Spark, Iceberg, Delta Lake)
• Strong knowledge of industry-standard datastores and data warehouses (e.g., Postgres, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, DynamoDB, Snowflake)
• Strong proficiency in SQL
• Experience working in large codebases on cross-functional teams
• Ability to balance a sense of urgency with delivering high-quality, pragmatic solutions
• Strong sense of ownership
• Self-motivated with an enjoyment for fast-paced, startup environments

Nice To Haves

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, computer engineering, electrical engineering OR equivalent work experience

Responsibilities

• You will work closely with other teams to understand their main pain points and translate them into self-serve and reliable solutions.
• You are expected to mentor other team members and be a champion of engineering excellence.
• You will be part of a small team, with a large amount of ownership and autonomy for managing things directly.
• You will have the freedom to suggest and drive organization-wide initiatives.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level