Senior Staff Software Engineer, Ads Infrastructure & Systems

Overview

Are you excited about cutting-edge distributed systems, data technologies, ML infrastructure, and scalable designs?  Are you inspired by delivering concrete impact to tens of millions of users and partners, while solving some of the toughest technical challenges in a 4-sided marketplace?  Are you passionate about mentoring and growing engineering talent, while instilling and fostering a principled engineering culture?  If so, we have a job for you!  The Ads Engineering team is looking for a seasoned engineering leader to act as the Area Tech Lead of Infrastructure and Systems, reporting directly to the Ads VP of Engineering.  In this role, you will directly contribute to the team’s myriad infrastructure/system innovations, both as an Individual Contributor and as a Tech Lead.  You will lead the team to design a next-generation serving and quality stack that supports the business’ broadening growth.  You will partner with Eng and PM Directors to prioritize and support all product needs.  You will develop company-defining collaborations with other engineering teams across Instacart.  You will grow and mentor engineers, and contribute to shaping engineering culture not only for Ads but for all of Instacart Engineering.

The Ads Engineering team builds E2E, full-stack systems to power Instacart’s industry-leading ads innovations in digital ads’ top growing channel - Retail Media.  As a fast-growing, critical piece of Instacart’s overall business, the Ads Engineering team strives to both meet and support our advertiser partners for their needs today, while also challenging the status quo to push forward next-generation technologies.  The team consists of a broad spectrum of engineers across all levels, with expertise ranging from backend infrastructure to data engineering to machine learning to frontend technologies and more.

About the Job 

• Leads, solves, and builds system innovations to solve some of the most challenging and interesting technical problems.  Some examples:
• ads serving and indexing systems with rigorous scaling, availability, and latency constraints, that can scale horizontally to billions of product items,
• infrastructure to rank heterogeneous content with cutting-edge ML models,
• data systems and products that process and move billions of events every day, and that power not just Instacart but hundreds of other retailer partners, and
• workflow orchestration that advances the state of the art in scale, correctness, and developer velocity.
• Establishes Ads’ tech strategy and roadmap, balancing between both short-term needs and long-term sustainability.
• Demonstrates ability to architect and design complex systems, considering scalability, reliability, performance, and security.
• Serves as a technical leader and mentor, guiding and empowering junior engineers through code and design reviews, knowledge sharing, collaborative problem-solving, improving key engineering processes, and fostering a thriving engineering culture.
• Grows and mentors engineering talent; identifies and develops the next set of leaders.
• Builds and maintains synergies with other engineering teams across Instacart; acts as a bridge to represent Ads in company-wide engineering forums and activities.
• Contributes to company-level tech initiatives as one of the company’s most senior engineering leaders.
• Note this is a hands-on IC / TL role at the Director+ level.  There are no people management expectations.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience building and leading systems engineering.
• Deep expertise in infrastructure and systems technologies.
• Proficiency in one or more relevant systems programming languages (e.g., Go, Rust or C++) and application programming languages (eg: Python or Ruby).
• Ability to effectively communicate and collaborate at the most senior engineering levels.
• Proven track record of growing engineering culture and talent.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience and expertise with data engineering, ML infrastructure, large-scale distributed systems, and/or Ads technologies.
• Experience with scalable, customizable service architectures.
• Familiar with AWS, Golang, Spark, Clickhouse, Snowflake, TensorFlow.