About the role

Senior Software Engineer on Data Governance and Foundations team at Instacart. Designing platform capabilities for policy management, data access, and compliance.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate services and tooling for role-based and attribute-based access control, policy enforcement, auditing, and data classification across Snowflake, Databricks, Trino, and Iceberg-backed datasets.
Develop event-driven controls and metadata pipelines (e.g., Kafka-based) to automate governance workflows, detect drift, and continuously validate compliance posture.
Collaborate with Legal, Compliance, and Security to translate requirements (e.g., GDPR, SOX, PII handling) into technical controls, runbooks, and demonstrable evidence for audits.
Own projects end-to-end—from architectural design and implementation to reliability, performance, and operability—setting and meeting clear SLOs in a fast-paced environment.
Standardize and evangelize best practices for data privacy, schema evolution, cataloging/lineage, and policy-as-code across Instacart’s data platform and partner teams.

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
5+ years of software engineering experience building backend or platform services for data-intensive or distributed systems.
Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Python, Java, Scala, or Go, plus strong SQL skills.
Hands-on experience with modern data platforms, including at least two of the following: Snowflake, Databricks, Trino/Presto, Apache Iceberg, Apache Kafka.
Demonstrated experience implementing data security controls (e.g., RBAC/ABAC, row/column-level security, tokenization, or dynamic data masking) in production.
Experience operating services in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including monitoring, incident response, and on-call participation.
Proven track record of delivering complex, multi-stakeholder projects in a rapidly changing environment.