Staff Data Infra Engineer: Lakehouse & Governance

EngineersOfAI; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Instacart is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure to join our Data Governance and Foundations Team. You’ll own the architecture and delivery of our open lakehouse foundation, governance, and multi-engine compute strategy.

You’ll mentor engineers, lead architecture reviews, and collaborate with Data Science, ML Platform, Ads, Finance Engineering, Product Engineering, and Security to scale the platform with reliability, performance, and cost awareness.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience at production scale.
• Hands-on expertise with modern data lakehouse architectures.

Responsibilities

• Translate data strategy into a multi-year architecture roadmap.
• Own the open lakehouse foundation: define formats, governance, and multi-engine compute portfolio.
• Drive real-time and streaming infrastructure for critical use cases (Ads, Fraud, ML).
• Pioneer AI-native data infrastructure by applying LLM/AI tools to platform lifecycle and automation.
• Lead architecture reviews, mentor engineers, influence hiring, and communicate trade-offs clearly.

Skills

Software engineering

Data infrastructure

Distributed systems

Data lakehouse

Job description

Instacart is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure to join our Data Governance and Foundations Team. You’ll own the architecture and delivery of our open lakehouse foundation, governance, and multi-engine compute strategy.

You’ll mentor engineers, lead architecture reviews, and collaborate with Data Science, ML Platform, Ads, Finance Engineering, Product Engineering, and Security to scale the platform with reliability, performance, and cost awareness.