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 Database Storage team are stewards of the database infrastructure that supports Instacart’s core lines of business. The scale of this involves hundreds of clusters holding petabytes of data, 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 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: RDS, Postgres, Yugabyte, EC2 and selected GCP services
Observability and An

Senior Software Engineer II, Storage at Instacart