Remote opportunity at
InstacartSenior Software Engineer, Catalog Store
Instacart is looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Catalog Store to join its remote team in Canada, with a preference for Toronto and eligibility in Ontario,…
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About This Role
Instacart is looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Catalog Store to join its remote team in Canada, with a preference for Toronto and eligibility in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. Operating under a Flex First approach, the company delivers essential grocery and household goods services while connecting customers, personal shoppers, and AI systems through robust cloud infrastructure. In this role, you will work within a small, autonomous team…
Job Description
Instacart is looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Catalog Store to join its remote team in Canada, with a preference for Toronto and eligibility in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. Operating under a Flex First approach, the company delivers essential grocery and household goods services while connecting customers, personal shoppers, and AI systems through robust cloud infrastructure.
In this role, you will work within a small, autonomous team responsible for the low-latency application-facing storage and retrieval platform powering Instacart's product catalog. Your daily work involves managing sharded self-hosted PostgreSQL clusters, high-frequency Go RPC services, Temporal-based ingestion pipelines, and custom in-memory key-value stores. You will steer projects from initial ambiguity to production deployment, handle fleet operations on AWS EC2, and utilize AI tools to accelerate development.
This opportunity suits an experienced backend engineer who thrives on distributed systems, real-time data challenges, and foundational infrastructure. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional partners, participate in on-call rotations, and help guide technical standards while mentoring other team members.
Responsibilities
- Lead end-to-end projects from initial design to production rollout across Catalog Store services and datastores
- Manage the health, scaling, schema tuning, backups, and upgrades of self-hosted PostgreSQL clusters on AWS EC2
- Bring new datastore systems into production through data freshness management, shadow testing, and staged rollouts
- Optimize and maintain Temporal-based data ingestion workflows
- Draft and review technical design documentation while building consensus across partner teams
- Take part in on-call rotations, drive incident response, and set observability standards with SLOs and runbooks
- Mentor fellow engineers, review code, and assist in onboarding new teammates
Requirements
- Minimum of 5 years of professional software engineering experience building and running backend services or distributed systems in cloud environments
- Strong production proficiency in Go, or extensive backend experience in languages like Java, C++, or Rust with a readiness to work primarily in Go
- Deep practical experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database in a production setting
- Background in designing scalable, reliable, and high-performance distributed systems involving low-latency services and caching
- Demonstrated history of independently leading projects through design, implementation, and operation
- Authorized to work in Canada within Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, or Nova Scotia
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- Experience managing services on AWS utilizing infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform
- Production operations background including metrics, logs, traces, incident response, and postmortems
- Experience building or operating low-latency and high-throughput RPC services such as gRPC
- Familiarity with self-hosting databases, key-value stores, in-memory datastores, or distributed SQL databases
- Familiarity with workflow orchestration tools like Temporal or data pipelines from Snowflake
Core Skills
Benefits
- Base salary range of CAD 168,000 to 177,500 per year dependent on permanent location
- Eligibility for a new hire equity grant and annual refresh grants
- Comprehensive benefits offerings provided by Instacart
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers are based only on the employer’s listing; where it doesn’t say, neither do we.
Where is this position located?
This role is remote and based in Canada, with a preference for Toronto. Candidates must be located in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, or Nova Scotia.
What is the salary range for this role?
The base pay range for successful candidates based in Canada is CAD 168,000 to 177,500 per year, with actual offers varying based on experience and location.
What primary programming language is used?
Go is the primary language used for this role, though candidates with deep production experience in other backend languages like Java, C++, Rust, or Ruby are also considered if willing to work primarily in Go.
Are there additional financial incentives besides base pay?
Yes, this position is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual equity refresh grants.
Sample Interview Questions
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