Software Engineering Manager, Database Platform

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 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.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing or operating control planes and Kubernetes operators for databases; familiarity with Go is a plus.
• Deep knowledge of open‑source databases and data stores (e.g., PostgreSQL internals, MySQL, Redis, or a distributed SQL/NoSQL system such as Vitess or CockroachDB).
• Background with multi‑tenant architectures, sharding, schema/version management, change data capture, and safe migration patterns with minimal downtime.
• Strong observability and reliability practice (e.g., Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and experience with resilience testing.
• Demonstrated cost optimization results in cloud database environments, including workload right‑sizing and storage/performance tuning.
• Domain experience in e‑commerce, marketplace, or other high‑throughput transactional systems.
• An advanced degree in a relevant field is a plus.

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