Own the end-to-end strategy, roadmap, and execution for Instacart’s managed database platform, delivering standardized, secure, and cost-efficient services across multiple cloud regions.
Lead and develop a high-performing team of 5 engineers; hire, mentor, and create an inclusive, high-ownership culture that values reliability, craftsmanship, and continuous improvement.
Design and operate multi-tenant database offerings with strong availability, scalability, and performance guarantees; define SLOs, mature on-call, and drive incident response excellence.
Build automation and control planes for provisioning, schema and version management, scaling, backup/restore, disaster recovery, and access controls using infrastructure-as-code.
Partner with Security, SRE, Data Platform, and product engineering to migrate legacy systems, land well-designed API and access patterns, and accelerate safe platform adoption.
Deliver meaningful cost outcomes by optimizing instance sizing, storage tiers, connection patterns, and performance; establish transparent cost reporting and guardrails.
Establish best practices in observability, testing, CI/CD, change management, and resilience verification to raise the reliability bar across all database products.

Requirements

8+ years of professional software or infrastructure engineering experience, including 2+ years directly managing software/infrastructure engineers as a people leader.
5+ years building and operating production database platforms or services at scale (e.g., PostgreSQL or MySQL), including automation for provisioning, upgrades, and lifecycle management.
Hands-on experience with a major cloud provider (AWS or GCP) and infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform); experience with container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes) or database operators.
Expertise with high availability and disaster recovery for relational databases, including replication, backup/restore, and point-in-time recovery; strong performance tuning skills.
Operational ownership of always-on systems: defined SLOs/SLAs, participated in on-call rotations, led incident response, and delivered postmortem improvements.
Security experience implementing RBAC, encryption in transit/at rest, secrets management, and audit logging for regulated environments.
Proven ability to define and deliver a platform roadmap and to lead cross-functional initiatives that span multiple stakeholder teams.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Benefits

Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work.
Flexible work arrangements.
Eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools

database managementautomationinfrastructure-as-codehigh availabilitydisaster recoveryperformance tuningAPI designcost optimizationCI/CDincident response

Soft Skills

leadershipmentoringteam developmentcommunicationcollaborationproblem-solvingcontinuous improvementorganizational skillsinclusive culturestakeholder management