Staff Software Engineer, Data Governance & Foundations

Instacart
United States
Workplace: RemoteFull timeFunction: Software EngineeringExperience: 10+ yearsSkills: ["Architectural leadership","Mentoring","Cross-functional communication","Ownership","Trade-off communication"]

Own the architecture and delivery of a modern open lakehouse foundation, including governance, access patterns, and a multi-engine compute strategy for stream and analytical workloads. Translate data strategy into a multi-year roadmap, drive real-time streaming infrastructure, and pioneer AI-native enhancements across the platform lifecycle. Lead architecture reviews, mentor senior/staff engineers, and align cross-org stakeholders on complex trade-offs affecting reliability, scale, and cost.

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FursaFursa
Instacart
Instacart
4 months ago

Staff Software Engineer, Data Governance & Foundations

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Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 3 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Own the architecture and delivery of a modern open lakehouse foundation, including governance, access patterns, and a multi-engine compute strategy for stream and analytical workloads. Translate data strategy into a multi-year roadmap, drive real-time streaming infrastructure, and pioneer AI-native enhancements across the platform lifecycle. Lead architecture reviews, mentor senior/staff engineers, and align cross-org stakeholders on complex trade-offs affecting reliability, scale, and cost.
Location: United States
Workplace: Remote
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Software Engineering
Seniority: Mid level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Translate data strategy into an actionable multi-year architecture roadmap aligned with leadership and evolving scale, maturity, and cost efficiency.
  • •Own the open lakehouse foundation by defining unified table formats, storage governance, and a multi-engine compute portfolio for interactive, batch, and streaming use cases.
  • •Drive real-time and streaming infrastructure for critical workloads (e.g., Ads, Fraud, ML), setting deployment patterns, SLAs, and operational practices for performance, availability, and spend.
  • •Apply LLM/AI tools across the platform lifecycle to accelerate development, automation, observability, and cost optimization.
  • •Lead architecture reviews, mentor senior/staff engineers, influence hiring, and communicate complex trade-offs to technical and executive audiences for cross-org alignment.

Pay and Benefits

Equity and Bonus:Equity

Key Requirements

  • •10+ years 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) plus 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.
  • •Demonstrated ownership of major platform transitions or migrations delivered to production with risk management.
  • •Ability to build cost/benefit and TCO models for infrastructure investments and communicate architecture docs and strategy memos across teams.
Experience:10+ yearsData infrastructureDistributed systemsData lakehouseStreamingOpen sourcePlatform engineering
Skills:Architectural leadershipMentoringCross-functional communicationOwnershipTrade-off communication
Tech Stack:Apache IcebergApache FlinkTrinoClickHouseApache KafkaApache SparkSnowflakeDatabricksConfluentAirflowDbtDelta LakeScalaPythonPostgresAWSLLMAIHudi

Company Brief

Instacart
Operates an online grocery marketplace connecting customers with personal shoppers and local retailers for grocery delivery and pickup. Provides technology, logistics, and advertising solutions to supermarkets and consumer packaged goods brands.
Industry: Online Marketplaces
Company Size: Enterprise (1,001+ employees)
Revenue: USD 1B+
Growth: Public Company
Valuation: Public Company (Market Cap in USD)
Funding: IPO / Publicly Listed
Headquarters: San Francisco, United States
Founded: 2012
Glassdoor
Glassdoor: 3.6
WebsiteLinkedIn