Staff Software Engineer, Data Governance & Foundations

Instacart · United States - RemoteRemote

In short

▸Ingeniero de software de alto nivel que construye y guía la arquitectura de la plataforma de datos de Instacart.
▸Trabaja en un data lakehouse abierto con tecnologías como Iceberg, Flink y Spark, enfocado en gobernanza, acceso y rendimiento en tiempo real.
▸Destaca por liderar la integración de IA en la infraestructura de datos, automatizando desarrollo y optimización de costos.

Proficiency in English is required for collaboration across global teams.

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What they ask for

✓Experiencia comprobada en arquitectura de plataformas de datos a gran escala.
✓Conocimiento profundo de sistemas de almacenamiento y procesamiento de datos (lakehouse, streaming, batch).
✓Habilidades avanzadas en diseño de arquitecturas escalables y de bajo costo.
✓Capacidad para liderar decisiones técnicas con impacto financiero y operativo.
✓Experiencia en herramientas como Apache Iceberg, Flink, Spark, Kafka, Trino o ClickHouse.
✓Capacidad para colaborar con múltiples equipos (ML, Ads, Seguridad, Product) en entornos ágiles.

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Apache IcebergApache FlinkTrinoClickHouseApache KafkaApache SparkSnowflakeDatabricksConfluentAirflow

Who should you write to at Instacart?

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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 Instacarts Data Infrastructure organization builds and operates the systems that power our company’s data ecosystem, including a modern open data lakehouse on Apache Iceberg, a multi-engine compute platform for stream and analytical workloads, and self-serve tooling that helps Product, Data Science, ML, Ads, Finance, and engineering teams move fast with data. We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure to join our Data Governance and Foundations Team. In this role, you’ll serve as a senior technical leader owning the architecture and delivery of our open lakehouse foundation, governance and access patterns, and multi-engine compute strategy—balancing today’s reliability with the next three to five years of scale, maturity, and cost efficiency. You’ll collaborate closely with engineering leadership and stakeholders across Data Science, ML Platform, Ads Infrastructure, Finance Engineering, Product Engineering, and Security. You’ll operate with a high degree of ownership in a fast-paced environment where architectural decisions have real technical and financial consequences. If you thrive on complex, high-scale challenges and roll-up-your-sleeves execution, this is a chance to shape the backbone of Instacart’s data platform. Our stack includes technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Trino, ClickHouse, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent, Airflow, dbt, Delta Lake, Scala, Python, Postgres, and AWS. You’ll join a focused team of 7 engineers that values pragmatism, clarity, and impact. About the Job • Translate Instacart’s data strategy (e.g., monetization, federated access, real-time) into an actionable 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 (interactive, batch, streaming) 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 that balance 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—an

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