Senior Software Engineer, Storage

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

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