About the role
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.