We're transforming the grocery industry

At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.

Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.

Instacart is a Flex First team

There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.

 

Overview

 

About the Role

Our backend systems power the frontend clients used by millions of customers every year to buy their groceries online. These systems must also support tight integration with the largest retailers in the US and Canada. Engineering at Instacart provides the opportunity to work on challenging scaling problems while also designing the features that will define our industry. You will learn how to build in an open collaborative environment serving millions of requests daily.

As a Senior Software Engineer in our Privacy Engineering team, you will be responsible for building the core privacy components that product teams across Instacart use to ensure our Customers can be in control of their data. In this role you will help connect our Customers to cutting edge privacy systems we have developed and deployed internally.

About the Team

The Privacy team is a platform team in the Security Engineering organization that believes it should be easy to build products that respect our user’s privacy. To do this, we manage our internal data privacy architecture that includes systems to annotate, find, and delete data across production and offline data storage systems. Additionally, we build the front end components that product teams across Instacart use to give our users direct access to these internal systems.

The Privacy team is a member of our core Privacy working group, that includes our Legal team, Compliance team, Operations team, and privacy partners for each of our main product pillars. Additionally we work closely with our Infrastructure, Data Platform, and Security engineering teams to ensure privacy controls are in place effectively across all levels of our stack. 

 

About the Job

Your responsibilities will include:

  • Designing, developing, and sustaining the comprehensive access controls and governance systems that improve the integrity and privacy of our data.
  • Ensuring the reliability, scalability, and security of the data platform.
  • Collaborating with various stakeholders and actively involving data infrastructure.

 

About you

Minimum Qualifications

We are looking for someone who:

  • Has 5+ years of experience in software engineering.
  • Builds and collaborates with our backend privacy engineers on the internal systems that enable privacy by design, touching all aspects of our full tech stack to turn privacy controls into reusable components..
  • Develops scalable and pragmatic controls related to data collection, classification, storage, access, usage, and deletion in data warehouse environments and/or operational data systems.
  • Communicates capably and is comfortable seeking and receiving feedback.
  • Possesses strong analytical and debugging skills.
  • Takes a strong sense of ownership while working with large codebases and diverse suite of products.
  • Embraces a collaborative mindset to partner with engineers, designers, and PMs from multiple teams to co-create impactful solutions while supporting system contributions.
  • Communicates clearly, presents ideas well, and can influence key stakeholders at manager, director, and VP levels.

Preferred Qualifications

We would love it if you:

  • Hold a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or can demonstrate equivalent industry experience (4+ years).
  • Have prior work experience in Software, Security or Privacy Engineering.
  • Experience working with cloud-based data platforms such as Snowflake or Databricks.
  • Strong knowledge of common back-end web technologies (such as Ruby on Rails, Python, Golang, SQL, etc.) and big data technologies (such as Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Flink) in a large scale distributed system environment
  • Have proven experience with distributed system designs.
  • Possess strong general programming and algorithm skills.
  • Show strong attention to detail and accuracy in your implementation.
  • Appreciate a data-driven mindset.
  • An ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams
  • Excellent communication skills, including written, to serve as an advocate & evangelist for the Privacy team

#LI-Remote

Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here. Currently, we are only hiring in the following provinces: Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.

Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.

For Canadian based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.

CAN
$162,000—$180,000 CAD

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At Instacart, we like to think of ourselves as a potluck—where everyone brings something new, different, and flavorful to the table. We believe our team’s wide range of perspectives, experiences and backgrounds enable us to build a better product for our customers. Instacart is for everyone, and we’re committed to fostering diverse and inclusive teams that reflect the communities we serve.

Individuals seeking employment at Instacart are considered without regards to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other protected characteristic. 

Please note: If you apply for more than one job, you will be asked to fill out the questionnaire for each application.  

How is this information used?

In order to track our effectiveness in recruiting a wide range of talent and to ensure that we comply with reporting requirements, we invite all applicants to voluntarily provide demographic information in a confidential survey. Providing this information is entirely optional. It is only used to ensure our hiring efforts remain free of bias and for diversity monitoring purposes. Data collected is not factored into the hiring decision or thereafter and will not affect your opportunity for employment at Instacart.

Who has access to this data?

To ensure our hiring efforts are equitable, data is stored confidentially in our ATS (Applicant Tracking System) where only an Administrator can view demographic reporting. It is not accessible to hiring teams. Data is stored securely in a cloud-based data-warehouse to create anonymized dashboards that select HR leaders can reference.

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  • 2SLGBTQIA+: An umbrella term for a range of sexual orientations and gender identities/expressions. Stands for "Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual. The plus sign is meant to encompass all other identities that belong to this community."
  • Race/Ethnicity: A person’s racial, ethnic or origin identity. 
  • Disability Status: A person’s physical or mental impairment which may limit one or more of their major life activities. Learn more here. 
  • Veteran Status: A person who has spent time serving in any branch of the military (retired or active).
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