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 Product Engineering.

Location: Remote (US)

Salary: $221,000—$279,500 USD

Responsibilities

• Translate Instacart’s data strategy into an actionable multi-year architecture roadmap; align with leadership while evolving the platform for scale, maturity, and cost efficiency.
• Own the open lakehouse foundation: define and deliver unified table formats, storage governance, and a multi-engine compute portfolio that enables portability and prevents lock-in.
• Drive real-time and streaming infrastructure for critical use cases (Ads, Fraud, ML): set deployment patterns, SLAs, and operational practices that balance performance, availability, and spend.
• Pioneer AI-native data infrastructure engineering by applying LLM/AI tools to the platform lifecycle—accelerating development, automation, observability, and cost optimization—and partnering to embed AI-powered capabilities into the platform.
• Elevate engineering excellence: lead architecture reviews, mentor senior/staff engineers, influence hiring, and clearly communicate complex trade-offs to both technical and executive audiences to ensure cross-org alignment.

Requirements

• 10+ 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), including performance tuning and production reliability.
• Experience with event-driven and streaming infrastructure (e.g., Kafka, Flink) for real-time pipelines and serving systems.
• Proven ownership of major platform transitions or migrations (build vs. buy, migration design, risk management) delivered to production.
• Ability to build cost/benefit and TCO models for infrastructure investments and to drive alignment via clear architecture docs and strategy memos across multiple teams and leadership levels.

Benefits

• Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work.
• This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location.
• Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role.
• This role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.
• Please read more about our benefits offerings here.

Additional Information

• Originally posted on Himalayas