Staff Software Engineer, Data Governance & Foundations

Experteer Overview In this role you will shape Instacart’s data backbone by designing a scalable open lakehouse foundation with governance and multi-engine compute. You will partner with Data Science, ML, Ads, and Security teams to balance reliability, performance, and cost as we scale. You’ll lead architecture decisions and mentor engineers to drive cross-org alignment. This is a chance to advance a modern data platform that powers critical real-time and analytics workloads. Join us to help serve millions of shoppers and unlock AI-enabled data capabilities. Compensation / Benefits * Translate data strategy into a multi-year architecture roadmap and align with leadership * Own the open lakehouse foundation including unified table formats and governance * Define and manage a multi-engine compute portfolio (interactive, batch, streaming) * Drive real-time and streaming infrastructure for high-impact use cases (Ads, Fraud, ML) * Lead architecture reviews, mentor engineers, influence hiring, and communicate trade-offs to stakeholders * Pioneer AI-native data infrastructure by applying LLM/AI to platform lifecycle and automation Tasks * 10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating data infrastructure or distributed systems at production scale * Hands-on expertise with open table formats (e.g., Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi) and distributed query/compute engines (e.g., Trino, Spark, ClickHouse) * Experience with event-driven and streaming infrastructure (e.g., Kafka, Flink) for real-time pipelines * Proven ownership of major platform transitions or migrations delivered to production * Ability to build cost/benefit and TCO models and communicate architecture strategy across teams Key requirements * remote-friendly” * flexible work locations * new hire equity grant * annual equity refresh grants * competitive compensation * benefits package

hiring, and communicate trade-offs to stakeholders * Pioneer AI-native data infrastructure by applying LLM/AI to platform lifecycle and automation Tasks * 10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating data infrastructure or distributed systems at production scale * Hands-on expertise with open table formats (e.g., Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi) and distributed query/compute engines (e.g., Trino, Spark, ClickHouse) * Experience with event-driven and streaming infrastructure (e.g., Kafka, Flink) for real-time pipelines * Proven ownership of major platform transitions or migrations delivered to production * Ability to build cost/benefit and TCO models and communicate architecture strategy across teams Key requirements * remote-friendly” * flexible work locations * new hire equity grant * annual equity refresh grants * competitive compensation * benefits package