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.
As a Senior Software Engineer in our Data Platform team, you will be the technical force that shapes our data infrastructure. You will design, develop, and maintain comprehensive access controls and governance frameworks to safeguard the integrity and privacy of our data. Your work will elevate the data utilization across several departments, enabling valuable insights, informed decision-making, and driving business value.
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
Your responsibilities will include:
- Designing, developing, and sustaining the comprehensive access controls and governance systems that improve the integrity and privacy of our data.
- Ensuring the reliability, scalability, and security of the data platform.
- Collaborating with various stakeholders and actively involve in the data infrastructure.
About you
Minimum Qualifications
We are looking for someone who:
- Has 5+ years of experience in software engineering.
- Exhibits an in-depth understanding of distributed systems, with proven experience with data processing technologies such as DBT and Airflow, and common web frameworks such as Rails.
- Proficiently uses SQL for writing and reviewing complex queries for data analysis and debugging.
- Can design for scale with the entire system in mind.
- Capably communicates and is comfortable seeking and receiving feedback.
- Possesses strong analytical and debugging skills.
- Takes a strong sense of ownership while working with large codebases and diverse suite of products.
- Embraces a collaborative mindset to partner with engineers, designers, and PMs from multiple teams to co-create impactful solutions while supporting system contributions.
- Communicates clearly, presents ideas well, and can influence key stakeholders at manager, director, and VP levels.
Preferred Qualifications
We would love it if you:
- Holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or can demonstrate equivalent industry experience (4+ years).
- Have prior work experience in Data Platforms.
- Hold experience with big data technologies such as Spark, Hadoop, Flink, Hive, or Kafka, and with both streaming and batching data pipelines.
- Have proven experience with distributed system designs.
- Possess strong general programming and algorithm skills.
- Show strong attention to detail and accuracy in your implementation.
- Have a strong experience writing complex and optimized SQL queries.
- Appreciate a data-driven mindset.