Senior Software Engineer, Backend Platform

the opportunity to see your work adopted at scale. This role can be remote across the U.S. and Canada. About the Job You will collaborate with platform engineers and SREs to deliver high-leverage capabilities that make building, operating, and scaling Go services simpler and safer. Expect a hands-on, iterative environment where you’ll balance long-term platform strategy with near-term delivery for high-impact use cases. Design, build, and evolve Go platform components (frameworks, libraries, service templates, and tooling) that are adopted across many product teams. Define and socialize engineering standards for APIs, RPC/gRPC, configuration, observability, security, and resiliency to improve service quality and consistency. Improve developer productivity through better build/test pipelines, reproducible local dev, CI/CD workflows, and automation that reduces toil. Advance reliability and performance by enabling robust telemetry (OpenTelemetry), profiling, load testing, and capacity planning baked into the platform. Lead migrations and modernization efforts (e.g., Go runtime upgrades, service mesh adoption, framework consolidation) with clear rollout and deprecation plans. Collaborate with SRE to enhance runtime operations (service discovery, traffic management, canary/blue-green releases, incident response) for Go services. Provide technical leadership, documentation, and enablement for teams adopting platform capabilities; participate in on-call rotations for platform-owned services. About You Minimum Qualifications 5+ years of experience in backend software engineering building distributed systems or platforms. 3+ years of hands-on production experience with Go (designing, coding, testing, and operating Go services or libraries). Proficiency with service-oriented architectures using gRPC and/or REST, including API design, versioning, and backward compatibility. Experience operating services on a major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containerization, deployment, and runtime configuration. Strong foundations in reliability and performance: observability (metrics, logs, traces), profiling, benchmarking, and incident/on-call experience. Track record of owning platform components (frameworks, SDKs, or shared libraries) used by multiple teams, including documentation and rollout. Proficiency with CI/CD and build systems (e.g., Go modules, build caching, automated testing) to improve developer productivity and release quality. Working knowledge of service security best practices (authN/Z, secrets management, transport security) and resilient patterns (timeouts, retries, circuit breaking). Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience. Preferred Qualifications Experience with service mesh and traffic management (e.g., Envoy, Istio) and progressive delivery (canary, blue/green) at scale. Deep expertise in Go performance tuning (pprof, memory/CPU optimization), runtime upgrades, and dependency management at scale. Hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, and building opinionated observability into frameworks by default. Background in building internal developer platforms: golden paths, service templates, scaffolding tools, and self-serve documentation/portals. Experience with data streaming and async systems (e.g., Kafka, Pub/Sub), and designing for idempotency and exactly-once/at-least-once semantics. Familiarity with API gateways, rate limiting, and multi-region or high-availability architectures. Ability to drive cross-functional initiatives, influence standards, and mentor engineers across teams in a remote-first environment. #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, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. 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 $196,000 — $207,000 USD