Staff Software Engineer, 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

Our team's mission is to make it easy for engineers to build and operate services at scale. Our team provides the systems and frameworks needed to compose and operate robust solutions for complex business problems. We work closely with other teams and engineering leadership to understand their pain points, build requirements, and enable them with high-quality solutions. We enable complex workflows for customers, shoppers, and advertisers, as well as provide the tools that allow AI to operate at scale.

Our team invests heavily in Workflow Orchestration, RPC/gRPC Frameworks, KV Storage, and tuning ECS/K8s. We develop our systems and frameworks in Golang, Python, and Ruby as needed to ensure coverage to the vast majority of Instacart developers. 

ABOUT THE JOB

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Infrastructure Platform team, you will play a key role in designing, building and operating scalable solutions that enable engineers to rapidly deliver features in a safe and efficient manner. You will be responsible for critical aspects of our tech stack, including solutions that operate at petabyte scale with tens of thousands of requests per second and touch every part of Instacart's business.

You will:

• Design and build bulletproof platforms that make Instacart Engineers more productive
• Lead other engineers by example and help them grow in their careers
• Identify and automate processes that remove toil and reduce on call burden
• Evaluate new technologies and tools that can transform how software is run at Instacart
• Continuously advocate for improving the quality and simplicity of our systems
• Identify risks and lend expertise in developing mitigation strategies
• Always keep customer experience top of mind

ABOUT YOU

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

• 10+ years of experience building and managing platform solutions at scale.
• Strong technical communication skills and the ability to work effectively with engineers and cross-functional teams.
• Experience with Golang, Python, and/or Ruby, and expert knowledge in at least one of them.
• Experience leading projects and mentoring engineers
• Strong knowledge of systems architecture and service oriented solutions
• Familiarity with cloud services, particularly with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• Practical experience with infrastructure configuration tools like Terraform

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience using Temporal, Cadence or similar systems in Production
• Experience running Redis, Memcache or similar Caching and KV Storage systems in Production
• Experience with monitoring/observability tools and best practices such as Datadog or Cloud Watch. 
• Experience working with ECS/Kubernetes including deployment, operations, and maintenance
• Practical experience with Mesh Networking and Service Discovery systems such as Consul, Envoy, Istio, etc.

#LI-Remote

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 a