Senior Software Engineer, Catalog Store

Instacart

. Serve as a senior engineer on a small team with significant ownership and autonomy, reporting to an engineering manager and partnering with the tech lead .

Posted 11/11/2026full-timeRemote • CanadaSenior💰 CA$168,000 - CA$177,500 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

Use this summary to align your resume positioning with the role.

Demonstrates extensive experience in backend service development and operations, particularly with PostgreSQL and Go, while leading projects from inception to production. Proven ability to optimize systems for reliability and performance in cloud environments, alongside strong mentoring and communication skills.

Highest-signal resume keywords

PostgreSQL Database ManagementGo Programming LanguageAWS Cloud OperationsDistributed Systems DesignIncident Response Leadership

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Backend Service DevelopmentData ModelingSchema DesignQuery Performance TuningInfrastructure-as-CodeLow-Latency Service DesignWorkflow OrchestrationData Pipeline DevelopmentAI Tool ApplicationCapacity Planning

Soft Skills

Clear CommunicationMentoringTechnical Trade-Off AnalysisCollaborationProblem-Solving

Tools & Technologies

AWS EC2TerraformTemporalSnowflakeSharded Clusters

Certifications & Qualifications

Bachelor's Degree in Computer ScienceBachelor's Degree in Computer EngineeringBachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering

Industry Keywords

Cloud EnvironmentsDistributed SQL DatabasesObservabilityIncident ResponseHigh-Throughput RPC Services

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloudDistributed SystemsEC2JavaPostgresRustSnowflakeSQLTerraformC++Go

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Serve as a senior engineer on a small team with significant ownership and autonomy, reporting to an engineering manager and partnering with the tech lead
Lead projects end to end across Catalog Store services and datastores, from problem definition through design, implementation, production rollout and operation
Own the health and evolution of the self-hosted PostgreSQL fleet on AWS EC2, including sharding, replica topology, capacity planning, backups, restores, schema and index tuning, upgrades, and retiring legacy clusters
Drive new datastore systems to production, including ingestion, data freshness, API migrations, shadow testing, staged rollouts and deprecation plans
Optimize and harden Temporal-based ingestion workflows
Write and review design documents, make technical trade-offs, and align with partner teams
Improve reliability through observability, SLOs, automation and runbooks
Participate in on-call rotation and lead incident response and follow-up
Mentor engineers, improve code quality through reviews, and onboard new teammates

Requirements

What you’ll need

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, including data modeling and 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 involving other engineers or teams
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
Experience operating services on AWS or another major cloud, including infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform
Production operations experience: observability, on-call participation, incident response and postmortems
Experience building or operating low-latency, high-throughput RPC services
Experience self-hosting databases or other core infrastructure, including sharded or replicated clusters and fleet automation
Experience mentoring engineers and raising code quality through code and design reviews
Clear written and verbal communication, including design documents, and ability to drive alignment across teams and stakeholders
Ability to balance urgency with high-quality, pragmatic solutions
Experience leading datastore or similar platform transformation initiatives with zero downtime
Familiarity with key-value or in-memory datastores or distributed SQL databases
Experience with workflow orchestration or data pipelines from warehouses like Snowflake
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

Benefits

Comp & perks

New hire equity grant
Annual refresh grants
Flexible work location from home, office, or coffee shop
Regular in-person events
AI tools for research, development and operations
Opportunity to learn from the team's collective experience