Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Instacart is building a data infrastructure team to develop and operate their data ecosystem, including a modern open data lakehouse and multi-engine compute platform, supporting various teams like Data Science, ML, and Finance.

Location: Remote (US)

Salary: $221,000—$279,500 USD

Responsibilities

• 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 such as Ads, Fraud, and ML.
• Pioneer AI-native data infrastructure engineering by applying LLM/AI tools to the platform lifecycle.
• Lead architecture reviews, mentor engineers, influence hiring, and communicate complex trade-offs.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating data infrastructure or distributed systems at production scale.
• Hands-on expertise with modern data lakehouse architectures and open table formats (e.g., Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi) and with distributed query/compute engines (e.g., Trino, Spark, ClickHouse).
• Experience with event-driven and streaming infrastructure (e.g., Kafka, Flink).
• Proven ownership of major platform transitions or migrations.
• Ability to build cost/benefit and TCO models for infrastructure investments.

Benefits

• Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits.
• Remote work with location-dependent pay ranges.
• Eligible for equity grants and annual refresh grants.
• Review benefits at Instacart careers page.