Staff Software Engineer, Bazel & Go

About the role

The Developer Experience team at Instacart is the force multiplier for our 1000+ engineers. We define and build the platforms, tools, and practices that enable Instacart engineers to ship high-quality software faster — from AI-powered code review to build infrastructure, developer onboarding, and local development environments. Our success is measured in developer velocity: how quickly an engineer can take an idea from concept to production.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction for Instacart's Bazel build system, including remote caching, remote build execution (RBE), build performance, and the developer-facing ergonomics of the build.
• Lead the technical direction for our Go platform, frameworks, standard libraries, service scaffolding, and patterns that Go engineers across Instacart depend on.
• Design and drive multi-quarter initiatives that measurably improve build times, CI reliability, and the local development loop for engineers working in Bazel and Go.
• Own the developer experience metrics for the systems you lead, define what "good" looks like, instrument it, and use the data to prioritize investment.
• Partner with infrastructure, platform, and product engineering teams to roll out changes to the build system and Go platform with minimal disruption.
• Set the technical bar for the systems you own on reliability, performance, upgrade cadence, and developer ergonomics.
• Mentor engineers in the team and the broader engineering org; grow the community of Bazel and Go experts at Instacart.
• Represent the team in cross-org technical discussions on build, CI/CD, and backend platform direction.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software development experience.
• Deep, hands-on expertise with Bazel, including remote caching, remote build execution (RBE), and performance tuning of large build graphs.
• Strong production experience writing and operating Go services at scale, with a point of view on structuring large Go codebases (frameworks, dependency management, testing patterns, shared libraries).
• Track record of leading cross-team technical initiatives with measurable impact on developer velocity, build performance, or CI reliability.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and distributed systems.
• Strong technical leadership, driving direction, mentoring engineers, and influencing without direct authority.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• Experience migrating a large codebase or monorepo to Bazel, or evolving an existing Bazel setup through major upgrades.
• Experience owning or contributing to a Go framework, standard library, or service scaffolding used by a large engineering org.
• Experience defining and instrumenting developer productivity metrics (build times, cache hit rates, CI reliability, local dev loop).
• Experience at high-growth companies operating developer infrastructure for large engineering organizations.

Skills

• Hands-on technical leadership.
• Metrics-driven, using build times, cache hit rates, CI reliability, and developer feedback to guide where to invest.
• A multiplier, making the engineers around you more effective through mentorship, clear technical writing, and pragmatic guidance.
• Comfortable driving cross-team change, building consensus for a migration or a platform shift and seeing it through to adoption.

Benefits

Not specified.

Pay

Base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location.

Schedule

Remote.