Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure

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 Infrastructure team, you will be the technical force that shapes our infrastructure. You will design, develop, and maintain comprehensive access controls and governance frameworks to safeguard the integrity and privacy of our infrastructure. Your work will elevate the data utilization across several departments, enabling valuable insights, informed decision-making, and driving business value.

ABOUT THE TEAM

The Infrastructure team provides a robust and cutting edge platform and tools 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 infrastructure strategy and building the platform that Instacart’s products will be built upon. Instacart’s technology is constantly changing and adapting. 

Overview of the Infra teams that are currently hiring: 

• Data Platform team: Our mission is to build and maintain a secure, scalable, and high-performance data infrastructure that empowers teams at Instacart to orchestrate, process, analyze, and share diverse data sets efficiently. We provide flexible compute frameworks such as Flink, Spark on Databricks, Snowflake, and Clickhouse to ensure adaptability for real-time and batch processing needs. By enforcing data security, compliance, and governance, we guarantee a robust, reliable, and high-quality data environment. We excel in cost management and optimization, providing intuitive dashboards and strategic budgeting to ensure operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Our commitment includes delivering user-friendly solutions, offering expert support, and providing ongoing training to help teams drive innovation
• Developer Experience team: specializes in optimizing software development processes by leveraging AI technologies and refining development tools. This team is vital in accelerating the code review process using AI-enhanced methods and improving unit testing to detect issues promptly, effectively minimizing the cycle time from idea to production. They focus on streamlining workflows and enhancing the build environment, which boosts productivity and allows engineers to rapidly progress through development stages, ensuring timely delivery of innovative features and robust applications.
• AI Productivity team: You’ll be joining the AI Productivity Team, a vital part of our Developer Infrastructure and Productivity organization. Our organization’s mission is to “Empower Engineers with efficient Tools, Scalable Platforms and seamless AI Infrastructure to maximize Productivity and minimize Service Ownership Cost.” We’re a dynamic team that thrives on collaboration, innovation, and the relentless pursuit of excellence. Our work directly contributes to Instacart’s success by enabling our engineering teams to work more efficiently and leverage the power of AI in their products

ABOUT THE JOB

We are leveraging AI to automate and simplify the development lifecycle. Our new features focus on:

• Owning and Enhancing the Build System: Develop and maintain robust build systems within Bento (our local development CLI tool) to support scalable and efficient software deployment.
• Incorporating AI Tools: Integrate AI technologies to streamline workflows, enhance code quality through automated reviews and testing, and reduce the manual burden on developers.

• Collaborate with team members to enhance Bento, focusing on scalability, usability, and the integration of AI tools.
• Work on the orchestration of on-demand and ephemeral CI environments that allow for integration and E2E tests before merging PRs. This proactive approach shifts quality assurance earlier in the development process (“shift left”), ensuring that only the most stable, well-tested changes are merged into the master branch.
• Continuously engage with metrics to drive improvements in our processes and outcomes, directly enhancing developer productivity and satisfaction.
• Maintain and improve the build systems to allow for 1000+ developers to get changes tested, built and deployed faster.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

• 5+ years of software development experience
• A strong sense of ownership, self-motivated and enjoy the fast pace of a startup environment
• Previous experience building and maintaining a robust build system using Jenkins, BuildKite, Gitlab or CircleCI
• Strong knowledge of Go, Ruby, or Python and experience with AWS Infrastructure 
• Ability to balance a sense of urgency with shipping high quality and pragmatic solutions

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 read more about our benefits offerings here.

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

CAN$162,000—$180,000 CAD