Senior Software Engineer, Catalog Store

Responsibilities

You will lead the end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of critical catalog storage services and datastores. Additionally, you will drive technical direction, mentor engineers, and ensure system reliability through observability and incident response.

Requirements

Candidates must have 5+ years of professional software engineering experience in large-scale cloud environments with strong proficiency in Go or a similar backend language. Deep hands-on experience with relational databases like PostgreSQL and designing distributed systems is required.

Skills

• Go
• PostgreSQL
• Distributed systems
• Cloud services
• AWS
• Temporal
• Data modeling
• Performance tuning
• System architecture
• Observability
• Incident response
• Mentoring
• Infrastructure-as-code
• Terraform
• RPC services
• Database sharding

Benefits

• Equity grant
• Annual refresh grants
• Flexible work policy

About this role

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, and every product a customer searches for, browses, or adds to their cart is served from storage systems the Catalog Store team builds and runs. We own the low-latency, application-facing storage and retrieval platform behind Instacart's product catalog, serving Search, Ads, shopper and customer apps, and AI systems across the company. Our platform includes sharded self-hosted PostgreSQL clusters, a high-frequency Go RPC service, Temporal-based ingestion pipelines, and a new in-house in-memory key-value store built for read-heavy workloads. This role is based in Canada (Toronto preferred) and is open to remote work in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia and Nova Scotia.
About the Job
If you're excited by distributed systems at 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 on a small team with a large amount of ownership and autonomy, reporting to an engineering manager and partnering closely with the team's tech lead on technical direction.
You will work in an AI-empowered environment, using and helping to shape the latest AI tools for research, development and operations.
You will lead projects end to end, from ambiguous problem to design, implementation, production rollout and operation, across Catalog Store services and datastores, including critical Go RPCs, PostgreSQL, in-memory key-value stores, and distributed datastore technologies.
You will own the health and evolution of our self-hosted PostgreSQL fleet on AWS EC2: sharding and replica topology, capacity planning, backups and restores, schema and index tuning, upgrades, and retiring legacy clusters.
You will drive new datastore systems to production, from ingestion and data freshness to migrating APIs onto them with shadow testing, staged rollouts and clear deprecation plans.
You will optimize and harden our Temporal-based ingestion workflows that keep catalog data fresh, reliable and observable.
You will write and review design documents, make sound technical trade-offs, and drive alignment with partner teams across other Instacart pillars.
You will raise the bar for reliability through strong observability, SLOs, automation and runbooks, take part in the team's on-call rotation, and lead incident response and follow-up for systems you own.
You will mentor other engineers, raise code quality through thoughtful review, and help onboard new teammates.
Instacart's technology is constantly changing and adapting. Some of the technologies you would use at Instacart include:
Languages: Go (primary), Python, Rust and Ruby
Datastores & Platforms: PostgreSQL (self-hosted on EC2), key-value stores like Redis, Valkey and Memcached, distributed databases like Yugabyte, and other software platform systems such as Temporal, Snowflake, S3, Terraform
Observability and Analytics: Datadog, 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
5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating backend services or distributed systems in large-scale cloud environments
Strong production experience in Go, or deep production experience in another backend or systems language (e.g., Java, C++, Rust) and willingness to work primarily in Go
Deep hands-on experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database in production, such as data modeling & lifecycle, schema and index design, query performance tuning, replication, backups and restores
Experience designing for scale, reliability and performance in distributed systems, including low-latency services and caching
Track record of independently leading projects end to end, from an ambiguous problem through design, implementation, rollout and operation, including work that involves other engineers or teams
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
Preferred Qualifications
Experience operating services on AWS (e.g., EC2, S3) or another major cloud, including infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform
Production operations experience: observability (metrics, logs, traces), on-call participation, incident response and postmortems
Experience building or operating low-latency, high-throughput RPC services (gRPC or similar)
Experience self-hosting databases or other core infrastructure, including sharded or replicated clusters and fleet automation
Experience mentoring engineers and raising the bar on code quality and best practices through code and design r...

About Instacart

Software Development · 1,001-5,000 employees · headquartered in San Francisco, CA