Senior Staff/Staff Software Engineer, Caching

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 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. 

ABOUT THE JOB

• You will be the technical lead of a small team, with a large amount of ownership and autonomy for setting technical direction, reporting to a senior 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 Caching 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, Ruby, Python and Rust
• Platforms: RDS Postgres, DynamoDB, Elasticache (Redis/Valkey/Memcd), Elasticsearch, EC2 and selected GCP services
• 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:

• 10+ years of working experience as a software engineer in one or more large-scale cloud services or application development environment 
• 2+ Years working with AWS Elasticache with a strong knowledge of SQL
• 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 (such as Go, Ruby on Rails, Python, etc) 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

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, computer engineering, electrical engineering 
• 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