Staff Software Engineer, Data 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

Instacart’s backend systems power grocery shopping for millions of customers and integrate closely with the largest retailers in North America. Our engineers work on complex scaling challenges while building the platforms and features that support millions of daily requests in a highly collaborative environment.

The Data Platform team develops a modern data platform that processes petabytes of data each day and supports Product, Data Science, and ML teams across the company. As a small team with many initiatives in early stages, you’ll have meaningful ownership and influence across system design, technical decisions, and execution. Your work will help shape Instacart’s data strategy and the foundation of our data lake.

Our stack continues to evolve and includes technologies such as Scala, Python, Spark, Snowflake, Kafka, Airflow, and modern data lake technologies. You’ll have the opportunity to deepen existing skills or learn new ones alongside an experienced team.

About The Job

You will work closely with other teams to understand their main pain points and translate them into self-serve and reliable solutions.

You are expected to mentor other team members and be a champion of engineering excellence.

You will be part of a small team, with a large amount of ownership and autonomy for managing things directly.

You will have the freedom to suggest and drive organization-wide initiatives.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

10+ years of experience in a similar field or environment

Strong knowledge of data infrastructure technologies in production environments (e.g., Python, Scala, Kafka, Airflow, Spark, Iceberg, Delta Lake)

Strong knowledge of industry-standard datastores and data warehouses (e.g., Postgres, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, DynamoDB, Snowflake)

Strong proficiency in SQL

Experience Working In Large Codebases On Cross-functional Teams

Ability to balance a sense of urgency with delivering high-quality, pragmatic solutions

Strong sense of ownership

Self-motivated with an enjoyment for fast-paced, startup environments

Preferred Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, computer engineering, electrical engineering OR equivalent work experience

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 rea

d more about our benefits offerings

here

.

For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.

CA, NY, CT, NJ

$265,000

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$279,000 USD

WA

$254,000

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$268,000 USD

OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI

$243,000

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$257,000 USD

All other states

$221,000

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$233,000 USD