Instacart Verified

E-commerce, Food Delivery, Technology

Senior Software Engineer, Storage

United StatesRemoteFull TimeSenior$199,000–$210,000 /yrPosted 16 days agoVisa sponsorship available

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Role summary

Instacart is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for its Storage team to design and build foundational cloud services, focusing on large-scale caching and in-memory datastore infrastructure. This role involves owning and innovating automated monitoring and control-plane systems for hundreds of clusters, supporting terabytes of data with high uptime requirements. You will work with major cloud providers, address data privacy, and contribute to architectural shifts like distributed databases and AI-powered monitoring. The position offers significant ownership and autonomy in a fast-paced, collaborative environment, with opportunities to drive high-impact initiatives that improve stability, productivity, and cost management. The role requires experience in distributed systems and in-memory datastores, with proficiency in languages like Go and Rust.

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

Instacart is powered by a robust set of cloud services. 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. Large-scale caching and storage plays an integral role in delivering efficient, performant experiences to customers. You will have the opportunity to own and build a whole new set of foundational engineering components in an open collaborative environment serving millions of requests daily.

Instacart’s storage needs are ever-evolving and growing. The Key-Value team are stewards of the in-memory datastore infrastructure that supports Instacart’s core lines of business. The scale of this involves hundreds of clusters holding terabytes of data in memory, with continuous 24/7 monitoring and uptime requirements. In response to this dynamic, demanding environment, the nature of our work is to innovate the automated monitoring & control-plane systems that run the clusters, as well as related supporting services like database proxies, snapshotting and backups, working with major cloud providers, supporting multiple environments for development and testing, data privacy and compliance at the infrastructure level. At the same time, we’re investing and preparing for Instacart’s future growth and success with forward-looking architectural shifts including distributed database systems, AI Agent-based monitoring and operations, tiered database storage. We’re focused on solutions that directly impact Instacart through stability, productivity and cost management, visible at the Executive level.

About the Job

If you’re excited by distributed systems at massive scale, real‑time data challenges, and opportunities to shape the future of AI‑powered commerce, this team offers a chance for outsized impact in a fast‑paced environment:

You will be a senior engineer in the team responsible for Storage platforms, with a large amount of ownership and autonomy for setting technical direction, reporting to an engineering manager.

You will work closely with other application engineering teams and internal stakeholders, owning a large part of the process from problem understanding to shipping the solution.

You will ship high quality, scalable and robust solutions with a sense of urgency.

You will have the freedom to suggest and drive high-impact initiatives related to in-memory storage solutions that unlock new innovations, accelerate application development, create resiliency & high-availability, and right-size storage needs company-wide.

Instacart's technology is constantly changing and adapting. Some of the technologies you would use at Instacart include:

Languages: Go, Python and Rust

Core Platforms: Valkey, Redis, Memcd, EC2 and related open-source tools

Observability and Analytics: Datadog, Cloudwatch, Sentry and Snowflake

If you have experience with these technologies, you will have the opportunity to dive deeper. If you haven't used these technologies you will have the chance to learn from the collective experience of our team.

About You

Minimum Qualifications:

4+ years of working experience as a software engineer in one or more large-scale cloud services or application development environment

1+ Years of hands-on experience, delivering large-scale solutions with an industry-recognized in-memory datastore (ideally Valkey or Redis)

1+ Years experience building cloud-based control-plane software

Self-motivation and an enjoyment for a growth-oriented startup environment

A strong sense of ownership that drives improvements for customers as well as automation and scale for the systems.

The drive & ability to dive deep into technical challenges and champion root causes, solving problems correctly.

You enjoy being highly productive, shipping code, reviewing others’ PRs and iteratively guiding code bases towards best practices and excellence.

You are able to scale yourself effectively via junior engineers and accelerate the team through effective designs, written & communication, delegation, establishing standards & best practices, code reviews.

Strong ability to architect and design systems using common back-end Web technologies in a production environment

An ability to balance a sense of urgency with shipping high quality and pragmatic solutions

Experience working with a large codebase on a cross functional team, with a knack for driving alignment across teams and stakeholders

Demonstrated capacity to take existing, complex solutions and evolve them to meet the changing needs of the business.

Preferred Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, computer engineering, electrical engineering

Familiarity with self-hosting core infrastructure

You are a mentor to other software engineers, helping equip them and grow as software development professionals

You like solving the kind of high-impact, org-wide problems that involve tackling abstract challenges and turning them into concrete programs that deliver successfully

#LI-Remote

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

CA, NY, CT, NJ

$199,000—$210,000 USD

$191,000—$201,000 USD

OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI

$183,000—$193,000 USD

All other states

$166,000—$175,000 USD

Sample Instacart interview questions

1
Design a system for real-time sentiment analysis of social media posts.
system designmedium
2
How would you design a global search for products (frontend)?
system designdifficult
3
Develop a secure distributed system for secrets storage and access.
system designmedium
4
Develop a distributed data versioning management system.
system designmedium
5
Design a distributed caching layer for high performance.
system designmedium

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