Staff Software Engineer, Bazel & Go

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing essential services for grocery delivery while offering flexible earning opportunities. The Staff Software Engineer will lead the technical direction for Bazel and Go, focusing on improving build performance, CI reliability, and enhancing the developer experience for engineers at Instacart.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the technical direction for Instacart's Bazel build system, including remote caching, remote build execution (RBE), build performance, and the developer-facing ergonomics of the build
• Lead the technical direction for our Go platform, frameworks, standard libraries, service scaffolding, and patterns that Go engineers across Instacart depend on
• Design and drive multi-quarter initiatives that measurably improve build times, CI reliability, and the local development loop for engineers working in Bazel and Go
• Own the developer experience metrics for the systems you lead, define what 'good' looks like, instrument it, and use the data to prioritize investment
• Partner with infrastructure, platform, and product engineering teams to roll out changes to the build system and Go platform with minimal disruption
• Set the technical bar for the systems you own on reliability, performance, upgrade cadence, and developer ergonomics
• Mentor engineers in the team and the broader engineering org; grow the community of Bazel and Go experts at Instacart
• Represent the team in cross-org technical discussions on build, CI/CD, and backend platform direction

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software development experience
• Deep, hands-on expertise with Bazel, including remote caching, remote build execution (RBE), and performance tuning of large build graphs
• Strong production experience writing and operating Go services at scale, with a point of view on structuring large Go codebases (frameworks, dependency management, testing patterns, shared libraries)
• Track record of leading cross-team technical initiatives with measurable impact on developer velocity, build performance, or CI reliability
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and distributed systems
• Strong technical leadership, driving direction, mentoring engineers, and influencing without direct authority
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience
• Experience migrating a large codebase or monorepo to Bazel, or evolving an existing Bazel setup through major upgrades
• Experience owning or contributing to a Go framework, standard library, or service scaffolding used by a large engineering org
• Experience defining and instrumenting developer productivity metrics (build times, cache hit rates, CI reliability, local dev loop)
• Experience at high-growth companies operating developer infrastructure for large engineering organizations