Senior Software Engineer, Backend Platform
About the role
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.
About the Job
- 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