Remote opportunity at
InstacartSenior Software Engineer, Catalog Store
Instacart operates an online grocery delivery network that connects consumers with retail stores while supporting personal shoppers. The engineering organization is currently expanding the Catalog Store…
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About This Role
Instacart operates an online grocery delivery network that connects consumers with retail stores while supporting personal shoppers. The engineering organization is currently expanding the Catalog Store group, which manages the application storage and retrieval platform powering search, advertising, customer and shopper apps, and artificial intelligence systems across the enterprise. The team builds and maintains low-latency storage infrastructure, including sharded self-hosted PostgreSQL clusters on AWS EC2, high-throughput Go RPC services, Temporal…
Job Description
Instacart operates an online grocery delivery network that connects consumers with retail stores while supporting personal shoppers. The engineering organization is currently expanding the Catalog Store group, which manages the application storage and retrieval platform powering search, advertising, customer and shopper apps, and artificial intelligence systems across the enterprise. The team builds and maintains low-latency storage infrastructure, including sharded self-hosted PostgreSQL clusters on AWS EC2, high-throughput Go RPC services, Temporal ingestion workflows, and proprietary in-memory key-value data stores.
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Catalog Store team, you will report to an engineering manager and work closely with the tech lead. This position offers a high level of autonomy on a compact team. You will guide projects from initial concept through design, execution, deployment, and operational maintenance. Your daily work involves optimizing Go RPCs, maintaining database reliability, scaling self-hosted PostgreSQL fleets, and utilizing internal artificial intelligence tools to accelerate development and operations.
This position operates under a flexible remote framework. The role is based in Canada, with a preference for Toronto, and accepts applicants residing in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. Compensation includes a base annual salary ranging from CAD 168,000 to 177,500, alongside new hire and annual equity grants.
Responsibilities
- Manage projects end-to-end from ambiguity to production rollout and operations across Catalog Store services and datastores
- Own the health, scaling, capacity planning, backups, and schema optimization of the self-hosted PostgreSQL fleet on AWS EC2
- Develop and maintain high-frequency Go RPC services and Temporal-based data ingestion pipelines
- Deploy new datastore systems to production utilizing shadow testing, staged rollouts, and structured migration plans
- Participate in on-call rotations, handle incident response, and maintain observability, service level objectives, and runbooks
- Mentor team members, conduct code and design reviews, and assist with onboarding new engineers
- Collaborate across partner engineering pillars to align on technical strategies and architecture
Requirements
- At least five years of professional software engineering experience in backend services or distributed systems within cloud environments
- Strong production coding experience in Go, or deep production expertise in an alternative backend language like Java, C++, or Rust with a willingness to write Go primarily
- Hands-on production background with PostgreSQL or another relational database covering data modeling, query tuning, and replication
- Experience designing distributed systems for scale, reliability, and performance, including low-latency components and caching
- Proven track record of independently leading complex projects from initial design to production operations
- Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
Qualifications
- Experience operating services on AWS infrastructure including EC2 and S3, alongside infrastructure-as-code tooling like Terraform
- Production operational exposure to metrics, logs, traces, incident response, and postmortems
- Background building low-latency, high-throughput gRPC or similar RPC services
- Experience self-hosting databases, replicated clusters, or fleet automation tools
- Familiarity with key-value or in-memory data stores such as Valkey, Redis, and Memcached, or distributed SQL databases like Yugabyte and CockroachDB
- Experience utilizing workflow orchestration systems like Temporal or data pipelines connected to Snowflake
- Experience applying artificial intelligence tools to increase development speed
Core Skills
Benefits
- Base salary ranging between CAD 168,000 and 177,500 per year
- New hire equity grant
- Annual equity refresh grants
- Flex First remote work policy allowing employees to choose their work location within eligible Canadian provinces
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers are based only on the employer’s listing; where it doesn’t say, neither do we.
Is this position remote?
Yes, this role is remote and open to candidates based in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia, with Toronto preferred.
What is the salary range for this job?
The base annual pay range for successful candidates in Canada is CAD 168,000 to 177,500, with exact offers depending on experience and skills.
What programming languages are used in this role?
Go is the primary programming language used by the team, alongside Python, Rust, and Ruby.
Are additional financial incentives offered besides base salary?
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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