Instacart · 3 weeks ago
Principal Software Engineer, Catalog & Real-Time Serving Systems
United States
Full-time
Remote
Lead/Staff
$335K/yr - $372K/yrInstacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing essential services for grocery delivery. The Principal Software Engineer will play a crucial role in the evolution and scalability of core Catalog and data-intensive systems, with a focus on advancing Machine Learning capabilities and infrastructure.
Delivery ServiceE-CommerceGroceryShopping
Responsibilities
Provide architectural leadership for Catalog, streaming, and data-intensive systems, emphasizing ML serving infrastructure and best practices, and drive the technical roadmap
Design, build, and scale reliable, efficient, and adaptable solutions to address changing business and ML needs
Lead the development and optimization of ML serving endpoints, ensuring high availability, low latency, robust performance, and implement fail-fast input validations and track metrics using Datadog
Centralize ML serving logic and decouple it from product applications to improve debugging, manageability, and system performance
Drive and contribute to company-wide transformational initiatives, impacting key business metrics like revenue, personalization, and operational efficiency, and influence the direction of ML infrastructure including real-time inferencing
Serve as a subject matter expert for Catalog, streaming, data-intensive, and ML serving technologies, providing guidance and mentorship to engineering and data science teams
Identify and implement innovative solutions to optimize system performance, reduce costs, and improve data processing and ML serving latency
Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including Product, Retailer, IC App, Ads, ML Infrastructure, and Data Science, to deliver integrated ML-driven solutions, and lead incident response and resolution for high-severity issues
Qualification
Required
Extensive experience in software engineering, with a focus on distributed systems, streaming processing (e.g., Flink), data intensive applications, and particularly, Machine Learning serving and deployment
Proven track record of designing, implementing, and scaling large-scale, high-performance systems, including ML serving infrastructure
Deep understanding of database technologies, data modeling, data pipelines, and ML model deployment patterns
Strong architectural skills and the ability to design and evaluate complex technical solutions across diverse technology domains, including Catalog, Streaming, and Machine Learning
Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills, with specific experience in addressing issues related to ML model serving, data quality, and infrastructure stability
Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to effectively work across teams, influence stakeholders, and mentor junior engineers
Experience with cloud platforms and related technologies, including ML serving platforms (e.g., Sagemaker)
Ability to quantify and demonstrate the impact of technical contributions on business results (e.g., revenue, efficiency, cost savings, and ML model performance)
Familiarity with challenges related to ML lifecycle, data flow, and best practices
Preferred
Experience working with large-scale catalog systems or similar data-intensive platforms
Significant experience in designing and implementing high-throughput, low-latency ML serving systems
Contributions to open-source projects or technical publications related to distributed systems, data engineering, or Machine Learning serving
Experience in a high-growth, fast-paced environment, particularly in the context of scaling ML initiatives
Benefits
New hire equity grant
Annual refresh grants
Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits
Company
Instacart
Instacart is an online grocery platform that offers same-day delivery and pickup services for retailers and consumers.
Founded in 2012
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Instacart has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (156)
2024 (173)
2023 (111)
2022 (159)
2021 (170)
2020 (59)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$2.92BKey Investors
T. Rowe PriceTiger Global ManagementD1 Capital Partners
2023-09-19IPO
2021-11-01Private Equity· $232M
2021-09-05Secondary Market
Leadership Team
Chris Rogers
Chief Executive Officer
Brandon Leonardo
Co-Founder
Recent News
2026-01-11
2026-01-09
Company data provided by crunchbase