Senior Staff Software Engineer

Summary

Join Instacart's Ads Engineering team as an Area Tech Lead of Infrastructure and Systems! Lead the design of a next-generation serving and quality stack supporting business growth. Contribute to system innovations, solving challenging technical problems related to ads serving, indexing, and data processing. Establish Ads' tech strategy and roadmap, balancing short-term and long-term needs. Mentor and grow engineering talent, fostering a thriving engineering culture. Collaborate with other engineering teams across Instacart and contribute to company-level tech initiatives. This is a hands-on individual contributor/technical lead role with no people management responsibilities.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience building and leading systems engineering
• Deep expertise in infrastructure and systems technologies
• Proficiency in one or more relevant systems programming languages (e.g., Go, Rust or C++) and application programming languages (eg: Python or Ruby)
• Ability to effectively communicate and collaborate at the most senior engineering levels
• Proven track record of growing engineering culture and talent

Responsibilities

• Leads, solves, and builds system innovations to solve some of the most challenging and interesting technical problems
• Ads serving and indexing systems with rigorous scaling, availability, and latency constraints, that can scale horizontally to billions of product items
• Infrastructure to rank heterogeneous content with cutting-edge ML models
• Data systems and products that process and move billions of events every day, and that power not just Instacart but hundreds of other retailer partners, and
• Workflow orchestration that advances the state of the art in scale, correctness, and developer velocity
• Establishes Ads’ tech strategy and roadmap, balancing between both short-term needs and long-term sustainability
• Demonstrates ability to architect and design complex systems, considering scalability, reliability, performance, and security
• Serves as a technical leader and mentor, guiding and empowering junior engineers through code and design reviews, knowledge sharing, collaborative problem-solving, improving key engineering processes, and fostering a thriving engineering culture
• Grows and mentors engineering talent; identifies and develops the next set of leaders
• Builds and maintains synergies with other engineering teams across Instacart; acts as a bridge to represent Ads in company-wide engineering forums and activities
• Contributes to company-level tech initiatives as one of the company’s most senior engineering leaders

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience and expertise with data engineering, ML infrastructure, large-scale distributed systems, and/or Ads technologies
• Experience with scalable, customizable service architectures
• Familiar with AWS, Golang, Spark, Clickhouse, Snowflake, TensorFlow

Benefits

• Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work
• This role is remote
• The base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location
• This role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants