← All roles

Staff Software Engineer, Data Governance & Foundations

Instacart· Software Engineering
Apply on company site
Remote$221k - $279.5kFull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Senior technical leader responsible for architecture and delivery of Instacart's open lakehouse foundation, governance, and multi-engine compute strategy, focusing on scale, reliability, and cost efficiency within the data infrastructure stack.

Responsibilities

  • Translate Instacart’s data strategy into a 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 balancing 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 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 technical and executive audiences for cross-org alignment.

Qualifications

  • 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).
  • 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 delivered to production.
  • Ability to build cost/benefit and TCO models for infrastructure investments and to drive alignment via architecture docs and strategy memos.

Skills

Required:Data lakehouse architecturesOpen table formatsDistributed query/compute enginesStreaming infrastructure
Nice to have:Platform governanceFinOps / cost optimizationSQL / Python / ScalaOrchestration & data pipelines

Benefits

  • Flexible work arrangement (remote-friendly) under Flex First policy.
  • New hire equity grant and annual refresh grants.
  • Competitive compensation and benefits; base pay varies by location.
Last updated Aug 13, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
Instacart logo

About Instacart

Marketplace for grocery delivery and pickup

Instacart is the North American leader in online grocery and one of the fastest-growing companies in e-commerce. Instacart’s same-day delivery and pickup services bring fresh groceries and everyday essentials to busy people and families across the U.S. and Canada in as fast as an hour. Since its founding in 2012, Instacart has become an essential service for millions of families, while also serving as an immediate, flexible earnings opportunity for hundreds of thousands of shoppers across North America. The company partners with more than 350 retailers and delivers from more than 25,000 stores across more than 5,500 cities in North America. Today, Instacart is accessible to more than 85% of households in the U.S. and more than 70% of households in Canada.

grocerydeliverye-commerce
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at Instacart