Staff Software Engineer, Data Governance & Foundations - Remote

Overview

Instacart's Data Infrastructure organization builds and operates the systems that power our company’s data ecosystem, including a modern open data lakehouse on Apache Iceberg, a multi-engine compute platform for stream and analytical workloads, and self-serve tooling that helps Product, Data Science, ML, Ads, Finance, and engineering teams move fast with data.

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Data Governance and Foundations Team. In this role, you’ll serve as a senior technical leader owning the architecture and delivery of our open lakehouse foundation, governance and access patterns, and multi-engine compute strategy—balancing today’s reliability with the next three to five years of scale, maturity, and cost efficiency.

You’ll collaborate closely with engineering leadership and stakeholders across Data Science, ML Platform, Ads Infrastructure, Finance Engineering, Product Engineering, and Security. You’ll operate with a high degree of ownership in a fast-paced environment where architectural decisions have real technical and financial consequences. If you thrive on complex, high-scale challenges and roll-up-your-sleeves execution, this is a chance to shape the backbone of Instacart’s data platform.

Our stack includes technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Trino, ClickHouse, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent, Airflow, dbt, Delta Lake, Scala, Python, Postgres, and AWS. You’ll join a focused team of 7 engineers that values pragmatism, clarity, and impact.

In Short

• Translate Instacart’s data strategy into an actionable multi-year architecture roadmap.
• Own the open lakehouse foundation: define and deliver unified table formats, storage governance, and a multi-engine compute portfolio.
• Drive real-time and streaming infrastructure for critical use cases.
• Pioneer AI-native data infrastructure engineering.
• Elevate engineering excellence: lead architecture reviews and mentor engineers.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience in data infrastructure or distributed systems.
• Hands-on expertise with modern data lakehouse architectures and open table formats.
• Experience with event-driven and streaming infrastructure.
• Proven ownership of major platform transitions.
• Ability to build cost/benefit and TCO models for infrastructure investments.

Benefits

• Highly market-competitive compensation.
• Flexible work environment.
• Eligibility for new hire equity grants.
• Access to comprehensive benefits offerings.
• Regular in-person events to build community.