Software Engineering Manager, Database Platform

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

Instacart’s Database Platform Team builds and operates the managed database services that power shopping, fulfillment, payments, ads, and retailer experiences across our platform. We provide reliable, secure, and cost‑efficient open‑source data stores with a custom control plane that enables self‑serve velocity for engineering teams while meeting strict availability and performance goals.

We are hiring an Engineering Manager, Database Platform to lead a team focused on delivering world‑class database products (for example, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and key‑value caches) at scale. In this role, you’ll partner closely with peers across Cloud Infrastructure, Security, SRE, Data, and application engineering to define the platform strategy, accelerate adoption, and land measurable cost savings through 2026 and beyond.

This role open to candidates in the US (remote) or in Canada (Toronto preferred), across Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. If you thrive on building resilient distributed systems, enabling developer self‑service, and driving operational excellence in a fast‑moving environment, we’d love to talk.

About the Job

• 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, 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.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

Preferred Qualifications

#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 CAD

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