Senior Software Engineer, Backend Platform SRE

Instacart; Ontario; Remote; CAD 165,000 - 183,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a forward-thinking company as a Senior Software Engineer on the Backend Platform SRE team, where you'll play a crucial role in enhancing system reliability and performance for millions of users. This innovative position offers the chance to work on large-scale distributed systems, tackle unique challenges, and drive continuous improvement through automation and AI tools. Enjoy the flexibility of a remote role while making a significant impact in the grocery delivery industry. If you're ready to take your career to the next level and contribute to a transformative mission, this opportunity is perfect for you.

Benefits

Equity Grant

Annual Refresh Grants

Flexible Work Environment

Market-Competitive Compensation

Qualifications

• 5 years of software development experience in various programming languages.
• Experience in designing and troubleshooting large-scale systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and improve services throughout their lifecycle.
• Monitor and ensure system performance and reliability.

Skills

Software Development

Distributed Systems

Incident Response

Automation

AI Tools

Coding Skills

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

Monitoring Tools

Automation Tools

Job description

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.

Overview

About the Role

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Backend Platform SRE team, you will play a key role in ensuring that both our customer-facing services and internal tools remain reliable, perform well, and meet the needs of our users. You’ll take ownership in high-pressure situations, responding to on-call incidents, resolving issues, and improving system reliability. Your work will directly impact millions of users, helping to build a more reliable and performant platform at scale. You’ll also drive continuous improvement to make Instacart’s services even better. Additionally, you will enhance the architectural framework to increase delivery speed and facilitate swift product development. You will also implement new processes to boost operational excellence, making use of AI tools to accelerate development.

About the Team

At Instacart, the Backend Platform Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team brings together software and systems engineering to design and maintain reliable, large-scale, and distributed systems that keep everything running smoothly. Our work focuses on optimizing systems, building robust infrastructure, and automating wherever possible to reduce repetitive tasks. On the SRE team, you’ll tackle the unique, exciting challenges of scaling systems that power millions of shoppers and customers, leveraging your skills in coding, algorithms, complexity analysis, and the design of large-scale systems. This is your chance to make a big impact at Instacart.

About the Job

1. Work on services through their entire life cycle, from design to deployment, operation, and improvement.
2. Help launch services by designing systems, building platforms, planning capacity, and reviewing launches.
3. Keep services running smoothly by monitoring availability, latency, and system performance.
4. Improve systems using automation and updates to make them faster and more reliable.
5. Respond to incidents efficiently to ensure services meet performance goals.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 5 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages
• 3 years of experience in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems, and 2 years of experience leading projects and providing technical leadership
• Strong proficiency in maintaining high standards for production services
• Rapid coding skills and management of high-traffic production services
• Experience with high scale throughput and distributed systems problems

Preferred Qualifications

• Skilled at navigating ambiguity and deriving insights from complex data sets
• Experience working across teams to champion platform solutions
• Visionary thinker capable of generating transformative ideas
• Expertise in leveraging AI to enhance delivery velocity and efficiency
• Prior experience in SRE a bonus

Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Currently, we are only hiring in the following provinces: Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia.

Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. For Canadian based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below: $165,000 — $183,000 CAD.