Senior Software Engineer, Backend Platform

Overview

Instacart’s Backend Platform team builds the shared Go-based foundation that powers services across our marketplace, advertising, partner, and fulfillment domains. We create the frameworks, libraries, tooling, and standards that help product teams ship reliable, secure, and high-performance services at scale.

As a Senior Software Engineer on Backend Platform, you will design and deliver the next-generation platform that enables our future service architecture in Go.You’ll partner closely with SRE, Security, Infra, and product engineering teams to define best practices, accelerate developer productivity, and raise the reliability and performance bar across the company.

This role is ideal for engineers who thrive in fast-paced, evolving environments, enjoy tackling ambiguous technical problems, and take pride in building platforms that dozens of teams rely on. You’ll have meaningful ownership, the ability to influence engineering standards company-wide, and the opportunity to see your work adopted at scale. This role can be remote across the U.S. and Canada.

About the Job

You will collaborate with platform engineers and SREs to deliver high-leverage capabilities that make building, operating, and scaling Go services simpler and safer. Expect a hands-on, iterative environment where you’ll balance long-term platform strategy with near-term delivery for high-impact use cases.

• Design, build, and evolve Go platform components (frameworks, libraries, service templates, and tooling) that are adopted across many product teams.
• Define and socialize engineering standards for APIs, RPC/gRPC, configuration, observability, security, and resiliency to improve service quality and consistency.
• Improve developer productivity through better build/test pipelines, reproducible local dev, CI/CD workflows, and automation that reduces toil.
• Advance reliability and performance by enabling robust telemetry (OpenTelemetry), profiling, load testing, and capacity planning baked into the platform.
• Lead migrations and modernization efforts (e.g., Go runtime upgrades, service mesh adoption, framework consolidation) with clear rollout and deprecation plans.
• Collaborate with SRE to enhance runtime operations (service discovery, traffic management, canary/blue-green releases, incident response) for Go services.
• Provide technical leadership, documentation, and enablement for teams adopting platform capabilities; participate in on-call rotations for platform-owned services.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in backend software engineering building distributed systems or platforms.
• 3+ years of hands-on production experience with Go (designing, coding, testing, and operating Go services or libraries).
• Proficiency with service-oriented architectures using gRPC and/or REST, including API design, versioning, and backward compatibility.
• Experience operating services on a major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containerization, deployment, and runtime configuration.
• Strong foundations in reliability and performance: observability (metrics, logs, traces), profiling, benchmarking, and incident/on-call experience.
• Track record of owning platform components (frameworks, SDKs, or shared libraries) used by multiple teams, including documentation and rollout.
• Proficiency with CI/CD and build systems (e.g., Go modules, build caching, automated testing) to improve developer productivity and release quality.
• Working knowledge of service security best practices (authN/Z, secrets management, transport security) and resilient patterns (timeouts, retries, circuit breaking).
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with service mesh and traffic management (e.g., Envoy, Istio) and progressive delivery (canary, blue/green) at scale.
• Deep expertise in Go performance tuning (pprof, memory/CPU optimization), runtime upgrades, and dependency management at scale.
• Hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, and building opinionated observability into frameworks by default.
• Background in building internal developer platforms: golden paths, service templates, scaffolding tools, and self-serve documentation/portals.
• Experience with data streaming and async systems (e.g., Kafka, Pub/Sub), and designing for idempotency and exactly-once/at-least-once semantics.
• Familiarity with API gateways, rate limiting, and multi-region or high-availability architectures.
• Ability to drive cross-functional initiatives, influence standards, and mentor engineers across teams in a remote-first environment.

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