Senior Software Engineer, Catalog Store

Overview

Instacart is powered by a robust set of cloud services, and every product a customer searches for, browses, or adds to their cart is served from storage systems the Catalog Store team builds and runs. We own the low-latency, application-facing storage and retrieval platform behind Instacart's product catalog, serving Search, Ads, shopper and customer apps, and AI systems across the company. Our platform includes sharded self-hosted PostgreSQL clusters, a high-frequency Go RPC service, Temporal-based ingestion pipelines, and a new in-house in-memory key-value store built for read-heavy workloads. This role is based in Canada (Toronto preferred) and is open to remote work in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

About the Job

If you're excited by distributed systems at scale, real-time data challenges, and opportunities to shape the future of AI-powered commerce, this team offers a chance for outsized impact in a fast-paced environment:

• You will be a senior engineer on a small team with a large amount of ownership and autonomy, reporting to an engineering manager and partnering closely with the team's tech lead on technical direction.
• You will work in an AI-empowered environment, using and helping to shape the latest AI tools for research, development and operations.
• You will lead projects end to end, from ambiguous problem to design, implementation, production rollout and operation, across Catalog Store services and datastores, including critical Go RPCs, PostgreSQL, in-memory key-value stores, and distributed datastore technologies.
• You will own the health and evolution of our self-hosted PostgreSQL fleet on AWS EC2: sharding and replica topology, capacity planning, backups and restores, schema and index tuning, upgrades, and retiring legacy clusters.
• You will drive new datastore systems to production, from ingestion and data freshness to migrating APIs onto them with shadow testing, staged rollouts and clear deprecation plans.
• You will optimize and harden our Temporal-based ingestion workflows that keep catalog data fresh, reliable and observable.
• You will write and review design documents, make sound technical trade-offs, and drive alignment with partner teams across other Instacart pillars.
• You will raise the bar for reliability through strong observability, SLOs, automation and runbooks, take part in the team's on-call rotation, and lead incident response and follow-up for systems you own.
• You will mentor other engineers, raise code quality through thoughtful review, and help onboard new teammates.

Instacart's technology is constantly changing and adapting. Some of the technologies you would use at Instacart include:

• Languages: Go (primary), Python, Rust and Ruby
• Datastores & Platforms: PostgreSQL (self-hosted on EC2), key-value stores like Redis, Valkey and Memcached, distributed databases like Yugabyte, and other software platform systems such as Temporal, Snowflake, S3, Terraform
• Observability and Analytics: Datadog, Sentry and Snowflake

If you have experience with these technologies, you will have the opportunity to dive deeper. If you haven't used these technologies you will have the chance to learn from the collective experience of our team.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating backend services or distributed systems in large-scale cloud environments
• Strong production experience in Go, or deep production experience in another backend or systems language (e.g., Java, C++, Rust) and willingness to work primarily in Go
• Deep hands-on experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database in production, such as data modeling & lifecycle, schema and index design, query performance tuning, replication, backups and restores
• Experience designing for scale, reliability and performance in distributed systems, including low-latency services and caching
• Track record of independently leading projects end to end, from an ambiguous problem through design, implementation, rollout and operation, including work that involves other engineers or teams
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating services on AWS (e.g., EC2, S3) or another major cloud, including infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform
• Production operations experience: observability (metrics, logs, traces), on-call participation, incident response and postmortems
• Experience building or operating low-latency, high-throughput RPC services (gRPC or similar)
• Experience self-hosting databases or other core infrastructure, including sharded or replicated clusters and fleet automation
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising the bar on code quality and best practices through code and design reviews
• Clear written and verbal communication, including design documents, with a demonstrated ability to drive alignment across teams and stakeholders
• An ability to balance a sense of urgency with shipping high quality, pragmatic solutions
• Experience leading datastore or similar platform transformation initiatives with zero downtime, such as dual writes, shadow reads, backfills and staged traffic ramps
• Familiarity with key-value or in-memory datastores (e.g., Valkey, Redis, Memcached) or distributed SQL databases (e.g., Yugabyte, CockroachDB)
• Experience with workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal) or data pipelines from warehouses like Snowflake
• A track record of measurable impact on latency, availability or cloud cost
• Experience applying AI tools to speed up development and operations, or building AI-assisted tooling for your team

#LI-Remote