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. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.

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