Staff Software Engineer, Data Governance & Foundations

Job Overview Instacart's Data Infrastructure organization builds and operates the systems that power our company’s data ecosystem, including an open data lakehouse on Apache Iceberg, a multi-engine compute platform, and self‑serve tooling that helps Product, Data Science, ML, Ads, Finance, and engineering teams move fast with data. We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure to join our Data Governance and Foundations Team.

Responsibilities

Translate Instacart’s data strategy (e.g., monetization, federated access, real‑time) into an actionable multi‑year architecture roadmap; align with leadership while evolving the platform for scale, maturity, and cost efficiency.

Own the open lakehouse foundation: define and deliver unified table formats, storage governance, and a multi‑engine compute portfolio (interactive, batch, streaming) that enables portability and prevents lock‑in.

Drive real‑time and streaming infrastructure for criti...