Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

We're transforming the grocery industry

At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.

Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.

Instacart is a Flex First team

There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.

OVERVIEW

ABOUT THE ROLE

Our backend systems power the clients used by millions of customers every year to buy their groceries online. These systems must also support tight integration with the largest retailers in the US and Canada. Engineering at Instacart provides the opportunity to work on challenging scaling problems while also designing the features that will define our industry. You will learn how to build in an open collaborative environment serving millions of requests daily.

ABOUT THE TEAM

The Data Platform team provides a robust and cutting edge platform to process petabytes of data daily using industry best practices. We work closely with Product/Data Science/ML teams to understand their needs and provide high quality solutions. The team is still small and many of our bigger initiatives are at an early stage. We expect you to work closely with stakeholders and shape these systems from design, technical decisions, project management to execution. Your input will be critical for driving the Data Strategy and building the platform that Instacart data lake will be built upon.

Instacart's technology is constantly changing and adapting. Some of the technologies you would use at Instacart include: Scala, Python, Postgres, Snowflake, DeltaLake, Iceberg, Clickhouse, Spark, DBT, Flink Kafka, Airflow

If you have experience with these technologies, you will have the opportunity to dive deeper. If you haven't used these technologies you will have the chance to learn from the collective experience of our team.

ABOUT THE JOB

• 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.

ABOUT YOU

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

• Self-motivation and an enjoyment for a startup environment
• A strong sense of ownership
• Strong knowledge of common data infra technologies (Python, Scala, Kafka, Airflow, Spark, Iceberg, Delta Lake) in a production environment
• Strong knowledge of common industry datastores or warehouses (Postgres, ElasticSearch, Cassandra, Dynamo, Snowflake)
• 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.
• Strong knowledge of SQL
• 10+ years of working experience in a similar field/environment

imagine 

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

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. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here.

Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.

For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.

CA, NY, CT, NJ

$260,000—$289,000 USD

WA

$249,000—$277,000 USD

OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI

$239,000—$266,000 USD

All other states

$216,000—$240,000 USD