Senior Site Reliability Engineer I
Job description
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
Join our team as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer I, where your expertise will play a crucial role in maintaining the backbone of our platform's operations. You'll take on challenges directly, ensuring optimal performance and growth while fostering a culture that prioritizes diligent and effective reliability practices. We're seeking someone eager to take ownership, skilled at addressing complex issues, and ready to explore innovative solutions to support the well-being of our teams and services.
About the Team
The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team combines software and systems engineering to design and manage large-scale, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. This team is tasked with ensuring high reliability, optimal system performance, and continuous improvement for both Instacart's critical internal services and externally facing systems.
SRE focuses on optimizing existing systems, building robust infrastructure, and automating processes to minimize manual effort. Joining the SRE team means facing unique scaling challenges while leveraging expertise in coding, algorithms, complexity analysis, and large-scale system design.
The team thrives within a culture of intellectual curiosity, problem-solving, and collaboration. With members from diverse backgrounds and experiences, SRE fosters a supportive and risk-tolerant environment where individuals are encouraged to think big, take on impactful projects, and grow with mentorship and guidance.
About the Job
- Develop scalable infrastructure strategies to ensure high availability, that align infrastructure planning with product roadmaps, and optimize cost, risk and performance with cloud providers.
- Establish and lead incident management protocols and response plans to coordinate rapid responses, investigate root causes, prevent recurrence, and collaborate with security teams to test response readiness and address security risks.
- Continuously monitor performance metrics and trends to proactively identify reliability risks. Regularly refine SLOs, SLIs, and Error Budgets to align with evolving standards and leverage data insights to propose improvement plans and suggest architectural updates to enhance system reliability.
- Oversee regular system evaluations to pinpoint and refine process shortcomings and lead cross-functional projects that promote system optimization and minimize technical debt. Collaborate with product and engineering teams to ensure system enhancements align with user requirements.
- Design and deploy automation tools to streamline deployment and operations, ensuring seamless processes while overseeing the continuous enhancement of automation scripts and frameworks, and rigorously monitor automated systems for performance and reliability. Address and tackle issues in automated environments promptly to reduce disruptions.
- Provide technical guidance to junior colleagues, fostering a collaborative culture for problem-solving and innovation. Organize and lead knowledge-sharing sessions and coordinate training in site reliability best practices to enhance team proficiency.
About You
Minimum Qualifications
- Proven experience in programming
- Robust knowledge of incident management processes and tools
- Exemplary troubleshooting and problem-solving skills
- Ability to work under pressure and prioritize tasks during high-stress situations
- Expertise in scaling application infrastructure for high availability
Preferred Qualifications
- Proficient in Ruby or Go
- Experience with cloud platforms (eg, AWS, GCP, Azure) and containerization (eg, Docker, Kubernetes)
- Skill in risk assessment for foundational infrastructure changes
- Experience in monitoring system performance and trend analysis
#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.
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 US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.