Senior Software Engineer, Data Governance & Foundations

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by building a team to enhance their data ecosystem. The Senior Software Engineer will be responsible for defining architecture roadmaps, owning platform initiatives, and collaborating with various teams to ensure the infrastructure meets evolving needs.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• Collaborate with various teams to embed governance and compliance controls (SOX, CPRA, GDPR) directly into platform architecture and data lifecycle management
• Optimize infrastructure spend at scale: identify cost reduction opportunities across compute, storage, and pipeline efficiency; manage multi-million dollar infrastructure budgets
• Write compelling architecture documents, strategy memos, and proposals that drive alignment with engineering leadership and senior stakeholders across the organization
• Mentor engineers on the team, model strong engineering culture, and help grow a high-performing data infrastructure organization
• Collaborate with Data Science, ML Platform, Ads Infrastructure, Finance Engineering, and Product teams to ensure the platform meets evolving needs

Requirements:

• 5+ years of software engineering focused on data infrastructure or distributed systems at scale, in a high-growth, data-intensive environment
• Experience in modern data lakehouse architectures and open table formats — Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi — with strong understanding of compute/storage trade-offs
• Hands-on experience with distributed query and compute systems (Trino, Spark, ClickHouse) including performance tuning and production reliability work
• Proven depth in event-driven infrastructure: Kafka for high-throughput data ingestion and Flink (or equivalent) for stream processing at scale
• Track record owning and executing major platform transitions, including migration design, phased rollout, and risk management under production constraints
• Experience building business cases for infrastructure investments: cost-benefit analysis, TCO modeling, and presenting recommendations to leadership
• Exceptional written technical communication — clear architecture docs, strategy memos, and cross-team proposals that drive decisions and alignment
• Strong ownership and comfort operating in ambiguity; ability to drive large, multi-team initiatives from concept to production with organizational influence
• Familiarity with data governance and compliance frameworks (SOX, CPRA, GDPR) and experience designing governance controls into platform architecture
• Experience with FinOps and data platform cost optimization, including managing large infrastructure budgets and negotiating enterprise vendor contracts
• Deep SQL expertise and strong proficiency in Python or Scala for systems-level work
• Experience with orchestration (Apache Airflow) and transformation pipelines (dbt) in large-scale production environments
• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience