Senior Software Engineer, Data Governance and Foundations
Top Benefits
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’s Data Governance and Foundations team builds the core infrastructure that keeps our data trusted, secure, and compliant across every region where we operate. We partner closely with Legal, Compliance, Security, and Engineering to translate regulatory requirements like SOX and GDPR into resilient, scalable systems that power safe data access and accelerate the business.
As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you will design and deliver platform capabilities for policy management, role-based data access, auditing, data classification, and lineage across Instacart’s modern data stack (Snowflake, Databricks, Kafka, Iceberg, Trino). Your work will directly enable product teams, analysts, and data scientists to innovate confidently while meeting stringent privacy and compliance standards.
You’ll join a collaborative team of 6–7 engineers focused on foundational infrastructure, with opportunities to lead high-impact architecture, influence standards, and mentor others.
About The Job
- Design, build, and operate services and tooling for role-based and attribute-based access control, policy enforcement, auditing, and data classification across Snowflake, Databricks, Trino, and Iceberg-backed datasets.
- Develop event-driven controls and metadata pipelines (e.g., Kafka-based) to automate governance workflows, detect drift, and continuously validate compliance posture.
- Collaborate with Legal, Compliance, and Security to translate requirements (e.g., GDPR, SOX, PII handling) into technical controls, runbooks, and demonstrable evidence for audits.
- Own projects end-to-end—from architectural design and implementation to reliability, performance, and operability—setting and meeting clear SLOs in a fast-paced environment.
- Standardize and evangelize best practices for data privacy, schema evolution, cataloging/lineage, and policy-as-code across Instacart’s data platform and partner teams.
About You Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 5+ years of software engineering experience building backend or platform services for data-intensive or distributed systems.
- Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Python, Java, Scala, or Go, plus strong SQL skills.
- Hands-on experience with modern data platforms, including at least two of the following: Snowflake, Databricks, Trino/Presto, Apache Iceberg, Apache Kafka.
- Demonstrated experience implementing data security controls (e.g., RBAC/ABAC, row/column-level security, tokenization, or dynamic data masking) in production.
- Experience operating services in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including monitoring, incident response, and on-call participation.
- Proven track record of delivering complex, multi-stakeholder projects in a rapidly changing environment.
Preferred Qualifications
- Deep knowledge of distributed systems concepts (consensus, partitioning, streaming semantics, exactly-once processing, schema compatibility).
- Familiarity with data privacy and compliance frameworks (e.g., GDPR, SOX) and building auditable technical controls and evidence pipelines.
- Experience with data cataloging and lineage (e.g., Unity Catalog, DataHub, OpenLineage) and policy frameworks (e.g., OPA/Rego, Apache Ranger, Lake Formation).
- Exposure to Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g., Terraform) and policy-as-code practices to standardize governance across environments.
- Ability to lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and drive alignment across Legal, Compliance, Security, and Engineering partners.
Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here. Currently, we are only hiring in the following provinces: Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia.
Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.
For Canadian based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.
CAN
$168,000—$177,500 CAD
About Instacart
Instacart, the leading grocery technology company in North America, works with grocers and retailers to transform how people shop. The company partners with more than 1,500 national, regional, and local retail banners to facilitate online shopping, delivery and pickup services from more than 85,000 stores across North America on the Instacart Marketplace. Instacart makes it possible for millions of people to get the groceries they need from the retailers they love, and for approximately 600,000 Instacart shoppers to earn by picking, packing and delivering orders on their own flexible schedule. The Instacart Platform offers retailers a suite of enterprise-grade technology products and services to power their e-commerce experiences, fulfill orders, digitize brick-and-mortar stores, provide advertising services, and glean insights. With Instacart Ads, thousands of CPG brands – from category leaders to emerging brands – partner with the company to connect directly with consumers online, right at the point of purchase. With Instacart Health, the company is providing tools to increase nutrition security, make healthy choices easier for consumers, and expand the role that food can play in improving health outcomes. For more information, visit www.instacart.com/company.
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Senior Software Engineer, Data Governance and Foundations
Top Benefits
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’s Data Governance and Foundations team builds the core infrastructure that keeps our data trusted, secure, and compliant across every region where we operate. We partner closely with Legal, Compliance, Security, and Engineering to translate regulatory requirements like SOX and GDPR into resilient, scalable systems that power safe data access and accelerate the business.
As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you will design and deliver platform capabilities for policy management, role-based data access, auditing, data classification, and lineage across Instacart’s modern data stack (Snowflake, Databricks, Kafka, Iceberg, Trino). Your work will directly enable product teams, analysts, and data scientists to innovate confidently while meeting stringent privacy and compliance standards.
You’ll join a collaborative team of 6–7 engineers focused on foundational infrastructure, with opportunities to lead high-impact architecture, influence standards, and mentor others.
About The Job
- Design, build, and operate services and tooling for role-based and attribute-based access control, policy enforcement, auditing, and data classification across Snowflake, Databricks, Trino, and Iceberg-backed datasets.
- Develop event-driven controls and metadata pipelines (e.g., Kafka-based) to automate governance workflows, detect drift, and continuously validate compliance posture.
- Collaborate with Legal, Compliance, and Security to translate requirements (e.g., GDPR, SOX, PII handling) into technical controls, runbooks, and demonstrable evidence for audits.
- Own projects end-to-end—from architectural design and implementation to reliability, performance, and operability—setting and meeting clear SLOs in a fast-paced environment.
- Standardize and evangelize best practices for data privacy, schema evolution, cataloging/lineage, and policy-as-code across Instacart’s data platform and partner teams.
About You Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 5+ years of software engineering experience building backend or platform services for data-intensive or distributed systems.
- Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Python, Java, Scala, or Go, plus strong SQL skills.
- Hands-on experience with modern data platforms, including at least two of the following: Snowflake, Databricks, Trino/Presto, Apache Iceberg, Apache Kafka.
- Demonstrated experience implementing data security controls (e.g., RBAC/ABAC, row/column-level security, tokenization, or dynamic data masking) in production.
- Experience operating services in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including monitoring, incident response, and on-call participation.
- Proven track record of delivering complex, multi-stakeholder projects in a rapidly changing environment.
Preferred Qualifications
- Deep knowledge of distributed systems concepts (consensus, partitioning, streaming semantics, exactly-once processing, schema compatibility).
- Familiarity with data privacy and compliance frameworks (e.g., GDPR, SOX) and building auditable technical controls and evidence pipelines.
- Experience with data cataloging and lineage (e.g., Unity Catalog, DataHub, OpenLineage) and policy frameworks (e.g., OPA/Rego, Apache Ranger, Lake Formation).
- Exposure to Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g., Terraform) and policy-as-code practices to standardize governance across environments.
- Ability to lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and drive alignment across Legal, Compliance, Security, and Engineering partners.
Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here. Currently, we are only hiring in the following provinces: Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia.
Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.
For Canadian based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.
CAN
$168,000—$177,500 CAD
About Instacart
Instacart, the leading grocery technology company in North America, works with grocers and retailers to transform how people shop. The company partners with more than 1,500 national, regional, and local retail banners to facilitate online shopping, delivery and pickup services from more than 85,000 stores across North America on the Instacart Marketplace. Instacart makes it possible for millions of people to get the groceries they need from the retailers they love, and for approximately 600,000 Instacart shoppers to earn by picking, packing and delivering orders on their own flexible schedule. The Instacart Platform offers retailers a suite of enterprise-grade technology products and services to power their e-commerce experiences, fulfill orders, digitize brick-and-mortar stores, provide advertising services, and glean insights. With Instacart Ads, thousands of CPG brands – from category leaders to emerging brands – partner with the company to connect directly with consumers online, right at the point of purchase. With Instacart Health, the company is providing tools to increase nutrition security, make healthy choices easier for consumers, and expand the role that food can play in improving health outcomes. For more information, visit www.instacart.com/company.