Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience

Overview

Instacart’s Developer Experience team builds the frameworks, tooling, and platforms that enable engineers to ship high-quality software quickly and safely. We remove friction from the inner loop of development, streamline CI/CD, and champion engineering excellence across the company.

You will join a 6-person Developer Experience team within a ~50-person platform organization, partnering closely with product engineering, infrastructure, and security to deliver reliable, scalable solutions that elevate productivity and quality. If you love tackling complex, high-leverage technical problems and shaping how engineers work every day, this role offers significant scope and impact.

This role is remote within Canada.

About the Job

• Design, build, and evolve core developer platforms and tooling, including build systems, CI/CD pipelines, test infrastructure, and code quality workflows.
• Drive measurable improvements to engineering velocity and reliability by reducing build and test times, eliminating flaky steps, and hardening developer workflows.
• Own critical roadmap areas end-to-end: define goals and success metrics, partner with stakeholders, implement solutions, and operationalize with robust observability.
• Establish and maintain guardrails for secure-by-default development (e.g., automated checks, policy enforcement, and golden paths) in partnership with security and infra.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives that span multiple teams, guiding architectural decisions, documenting patterns, and maintaining high standards for engineering quality.
• Mentor fellow engineers, promote best practices, and contribute to a culture of continuous improvement, transparency, and thoughtful experimentation.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• 3+ years of experience developing developer tooling, build systems, CI/CD pipelines, or internal platforms.
• Proficiency in at least one of the following: Go, Python, or TypeScript, with strong software design and code review skills.
• Hands-on experience with modern CI/CD systems and build tooling (e.g., GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins, Bazel, Pants, or similar).
• Experience shipping and operating services on a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes or equivalent).
• Demonstrated track record improving engineering KPIs such as build/test cycle time, flaky test rate, or deployment frequency.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills with a history of partnering across infra, security, and product engineering.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with monorepo strategies and advanced build/test optimizations (e.g., remote caching, test sharding, hermetic builds).
• Background in building internal developer platforms or portals (e.g., Backstage) and defining golden paths for service development.
• Deep familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and platform automation (e.g., Terraform, Helm) and service networking (e.g., gRPC, Protobuf).
• Strong observability skills (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana) and a data-driven approach to prioritization and measurement.
• Experience leading multi-team initiatives in a fast-paced environment and influencing roadmaps without direct authority.

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