Staff Software Engineer, Bazel & Go (Remote)

Instacart; United States; Remote; USD 162,802 - 171,334; Full time

Job summary

Instacart is seeking a Staff Software Engineer on Developer Experience to lead Bazel and Go platform initiatives. You will shape architecture, drive build performance, and improve developer velocity across thousands of engineers.

This hands-on leadership role requires deep Bazel and Go expertise, with a track record of mentoring teams, owning multi-quarter programs, and delivering practical, measurable outcomes in a scalable infrastructure environment.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software development experience.
• Deep, hands-on expertise with Bazel, including remote caching, remote build execution (RBE), and performance tuning of large build graphs.
• Strong production experience writing and operating Go services at scale.
• Track record of leading cross-team technical initiatives with measurable impact.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and distributed systems.
• Strong technical leadership, mentoring engineers, and influencing without direct authority.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction for Instacart's Bazel build system, including remote caching, remote build execution (RBE), build performance, and the developer-facing ergonomics of the build.
• Lead the technical direction for our Go platform, frameworks, standard libraries, service scaffolding, and patterns that Go engineers across Instacart depend on.
• Design and drive multi-quarter initiatives that measurably improve build times, CI reliability, and the local development loop for engineers working in Bazel and Go.
• Own the developer experience metrics for the systems you lead, define what “good” looks like, instrument it, and use the data to prioritize investment.
• Partner with infrastructure, platform, and product engineering teams to roll out changes to the build system and Go platform with minimal disruption.
• Set the technical bar for the systems you own on reliability, performance, upgrade cadence, and developer ergonomics.
• Mentor engineers in the team and the broader engineering org; grow the community of Bazel and Go experts at Instacart.
• Represent the team in cross-org technical discussions on build, CI/CD, and backend platform direction.

Skills

Mentorship

Leadership

Metrics-driven

Developer velocity focus

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in CS/CE or equivalent

Tools

Bazel

Go

AWS

CI/CD

Job description

Instacart is seeking a Staff Software Engineer on Developer Experience to lead Bazel and Go platform initiatives. You will shape architecture, drive build performance, and improve developer velocity across thousands of engineers.

This hands-on leadership role requires deep Bazel and Go expertise, with a track record of mentoring teams, owning multi-quarter programs, and delivering practical, measurable outcomes in a scalable infrastructure environment.