Remote opportunity at
InstacartSenior Software Engineer, Catalog Store
Instacart operates an essential grocery delivery and household goods service that connects millions of customers with personal shoppers. The Catalog Store team builds and runs the…
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About This Role
Instacart operates an essential grocery delivery and household goods service that connects millions of customers with personal shoppers. The Catalog Store team builds and runs the low-latency storage and retrieval platform powering product search, advertising, customer and shopper applications, and internal AI systems. The company is currently hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join this infrastructure-focused group. This position offers a high level of ownership and autonomy within a small…
Job Description
Instacart operates an essential grocery delivery and household goods service that connects millions of customers with personal shoppers. The Catalog Store team builds and runs the low-latency storage and retrieval platform powering product search, advertising, customer and shopper applications, and internal AI systems. The company is currently hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join this infrastructure-focused group.
This position offers a high level of ownership and autonomy within a small team environment. The successful candidate will guide technical direction alongside the tech lead and report directly to an engineering manager. Responsibilities span the complete lifecycle of scalable distributed systems, including self-hosted PostgreSQL clusters on AWS EC2, high-frequency Go RPC services, Temporal-based data pipelines, and custom in-memory key-value data stores.
The role operates under a flexible work framework, allowing employees to choose their workspace while engaging in regular in-person collaboration. Candidates must be based in Canada, with a preference for Toronto, and are eligible for remote employment specifically within the provinces of Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia.
Responsibilities
- Lead projects independently from initial problem definition through design, implementation, production rollout, and ongoing operations
- Manage the health, capacity planning, backups, schema tuning, replica topology, and upgrades of self-hosted PostgreSQL fleets on AWS EC2
- Deploy new data storage systems to production, handling data ingestion, freshness, API migrations, shadow testing, and staged rollouts
- Optimize and maintain Temporal-based ingestion workflows to ensure catalog data remains reliable and observable
- Write and review technical design documents while aligning with partner teams across different company pillars
- Participate in the on-call rotation, establish SLOs, enforce automation, and lead incident response and follow-up activities
- Mentor fellow engineers, conduct code reviews, and assist with onboarding new team members
Requirements
- At least 5 years of professional software engineering experience designing and operating backend services or distributed systems in cloud environments
- Strong production experience using Go, or deep production experience in another backend or systems language with a willingness to write primarily in Go
- Extensive hands-on production experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, including data lifecycle, schema design, and query performance tuning
- Demonstrated experience designing scalable, reliable, and high-performance distributed systems, low-latency services, and caching mechanisms
- Proven track record of independently driving projects end-to-end through implementation and deployment
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- Experience running services on AWS infrastructure using tools like Terraform
- Production background involving observability metrics, logs, traces, on-call duties, and postmortems
- Experience building or operating low-latency and high-throughput gRPC or similar RPC services
- Familiarity with self-hosting databases or replicated clusters
- Familiarity with key-value or in-memory data stores such as Valkey, Redis, and Memcached, or distributed SQL databases like Yugabyte and CockroachDB
- Experience with workflow orchestration tools like Temporal or data pipelines connected to Snowflake
Core Skills
Benefits
- Base salary range of CAD 168,000 to 177,500 per year based on permanent location and experience
- Eligibility for a new hire equity grant and annual equity refresh grants
- Market-competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits packages
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers are based only on the employer’s listing; where it doesn’t say, neither do we.
Where is this job located?
This role is remote and open to candidates based in Canada, with a preference for Toronto, specifically within the provinces of Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia.
What is the salary for this position?
The annual base pay range for successful candidates based in Canada is CAD 168,000 to 177,500, with exact offers varying based on location, skills, and experience.
What primary programming language is used in this role?
Go is the primary language used for this position, though engineers also work with Python, Rust, and Ruby.
Are additional financial incentives provided beyond base pay?
Yes, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual equity refresh grants.
Sample Interview Questions
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