Senior Software Engineer II — Self-Serve Productivity
About the role
Overview
About the Role
We are currently seeking a Senior Software Engineer II to join our Self-Serve Productivity team. This is a fullstack role with a frontend lean, focused on building and extending Portal — Instacart's central hub for everything data. You'll partner closely with data scientists, data engineers, analysts, and product engineers to design and ship the tools they use every day to discover, understand, and trust data. You'll have meaningful ownership over user-facing surfaces that touch the entire company.
About the Team
The mission of the Instacart Self-Serve team is to improve the productivity of data practitioners through easy-to-use, self-serve tools. The Productivity sub-team owns Portal (data discovery, lineage, metadata, data quality), our semantic layer (Medusa), and a number of supporting systems built on dbt and Airflow. Portal is going through significant UI investment — including a homepage/dashboard redesign and deeper integration across the data infra ecosystem — making this a high-impact time to join.
About the Job
- You will be part of a small team with a large amount of ownership and surface area, given that the tooling is used by the entire company.
- You will lead frontend architecture and product execution on Portal, while contributing across the stack where needed (Python services, data pipelines, APIs).
- You will have the freedom to suggest and drive new initiatives — including how Portal evolves as the unified data home base at Instacart.
- You are expected to mentor other team members and be a champion of engineering excellence, particularly around frontend craft, performance, and UX quality.
- You will work closely with other teams (Data Science, ML, Product Eng, Infra) to understand their main pain points around data and translate them into self-serve and reliable solutions.
About You
Minimum Qualifications
- Self-motivation and an enjoyment for a startup environment
- A strong sense of ownership
- Strong frontend expertise — deep experience with React and TypeScript, with a track record of shipping polished, performant product UI in a large codebase
- Comfort working fullstack — able to extend backend services (Python) and reason about APIs, data models, and pipelines as needed
- Strong knowledge of SQL and familiarity with common data infrastructure technologies (Python, Airflow, Snowflake, dbt) in a production environment
- Experience working with a large codebase on a cross-functional team
- An ability to balance a s