Senior Software Engineer, Data Governance and Foundations

About Instacart

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 of the Role

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, Data Governance and Foundations 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.

Key Responsibilities

• 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.

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.

Key skills/competency

• Data Governance
• Data Security
• Distributed Systems
• Cloud Platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Policy Management
• Data Access Control
• Auditing
• Data Classification
• SQL
• Python/Java/Scala/Go