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 reduction, or deployment frequency.