Senior Software Engineer, Data Governance & Foundations

Job Description

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. About the Team Instacarts Data Governance & Foundations team builds and operates the core systems that power the company's data ecosystem — a modern data lakehouse at scale, spanning ingestion, stream processing, analytical compute, and self-serve tooling. You'll join a collaborative team of 6–7 engineers responsible for keeping a highly reliable production platform running today while architecting the infrastructure that will serve the business for the next 3–5 years. This is a high-ownership, high-autonomy role. Architectural decisions carry both technical and financial weight, and you'll be expected to drive direction, not just execute it. You'll work closely with engineering leadership and cross-functional partners across Data Science, ML Platform, Ads Infrastructure, Finance Engineering, and senior stakeholders throughout the organization. About the Job Define and drive multi-year architecture roadmaps for large-scale data ingestion and processing infrastructure, setting technical direction that balances reliability, scalability, and cost. Own end-to-end platform initiatives — from build vs. buy decisions and migration design through production rollout and risk management — across Kafka-based streaming and Postgres-based systems. Partner with vendors (Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent) on technical integration, contract evaluation, and TCO modeling to inform infrastructure investment decisions.<

Required Skills