Senior Software Engineer - Backend Platform SRE

Overview

About the Role 

About the Role - 

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Backend Platform SRE team, you will play a key role in ensuring that both our customer-facing services and internal tools remain reliable, perform well, and meet the needs of our users. You’ll take ownership in high-pressure situations, responding to on-call incidents, resolving issues, and improving system reliability. Your work will directly impact millions of users, helping to build a more reliable and performant platform at scale. You’ll also drive continuous improvement to make Instacart’s services even better. Additionally, you will enhance the architectural framework to increase delivery speed and facilitate swift product development. You will also implement new processes to boost operational excellence, making use of AI tools to accelerate development.

About the Team

At Instacart, the Backend Platform Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team brings together software and systems engineering to design and maintain reliable, large-scale, and distributed systems that keep everything running smoothly. Our work focuses on optimizing systems, building robust infrastructure, and automating wherever possible to reduce repetitive tasks. On the SRE team, you’ll tackle the unique, exciting challenges of scaling systems that power millions of shoppers and customers, leveraging your skills in coding, algorithms, complexity analysis, and the design of large-scale systems. This is your chance to make a big impact at Instacart.

About the Job 

Work on services through their entire life cycle, from design to deployment, operation, and improvement.Help launch services by designing systems, building platforms, planning capacity, and reviewing launches.Keep services running smoothly by monitoring availability, latency, and system performance.Improve systems using automation and updates to make them faster and more reliable.Respond to incidents efficiently to ensure services meet performance goals.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 5 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages
• 3 years of experience in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems, and 2 years of experience leading projects and providing technical leadership
• Strong proficiency in maintaining high standards for production services
• Rapid coding skills and management of high-traffic production services
• Experience with high scale throughput and distributed systems problems

Preferred Qualifications

• Skilled at navigating ambiguity and deriving insights from complex data sets
• Experience working across teams to champion platform solutions
• Visionary thinker capable of generating transformative ideas
• Expertise in leveraging AI to enhance delivery velocity and efficiency
• Prior experience in SRE a bonus