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Instacart's Data Infrastructure organization is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the architecture and delivery of their data governance and foundations platform. This is a senior technical leadership role owning the open lakehouse foundation (Apache Iceberg), governance and access patterns, and multi-engine compute strategy.
Key responsibilities include: translating Instacart's data strategy into a multi-year architecture roadmap; owning the open lakehouse foundation with unified table formats and storage governance; driving real-time and streaming infrastructure for critical use cases (Ads, Fraud, ML); pioneering AI-native data infrastructure by applying LLM/AI tools to platform lifecycle; and elevating engineering excellence through architecture reviews, mentoring, and cross-organizational communication.
You'll work with a focused team of 7 engineers and collaborate closely with Data Science, ML Platform, Ads Infrastructure, Finance Engineering, Product Engineering, and Security teams. The tech stack includes Apache Iceberg, Flink, Trino, ClickHouse, Kafka, Spark, Snowflake, Databricks, Airflow, dbt, Scala, Python, and AWS.
Required: 10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating data infrastructure or distributed systems at production scale; hands-on expertise with modern data lakehouse architectures and open table formats; experience with event-driven and streaming infrastructure; proven ownership of major platform transitions; and ability to build cost/benefit models and drive alignment across teams.
Preferred: platform-level governance design experience; FinOps background; deep SQL and Python/Scala proficiency; orchestration and data transformation pipeline experience; CS/CE/EE degree or equivalent.
