Senior Software Engineer II, Ads Data Solutions Engineering

Overview

The Ads DSE team builds core capabilities powering Instacart's off-platform advertising, secure data collaboration (cleanrooms), automated taxonomy management, and platform foundations. We are hiring a Senior Engineer II (L6) to co-own the technical roadmap, modernize data solutions infrastructure, scale off-platform integrations and measurement capabilities, extend cleanroom collaboration, and automate taxonomy change management workflows.

About the Job

• Technical Leadership & Roadmap: Lead architecture for reusable, scalable systems across off-platform workflows, cleanrooms, taxonomy automation, and the Ads Data Solutions Platform. Evolve core abstractions, testing, CI/CD, observability, and cost efficiency. Align stakeholders and manage dependencies.
• Pillar Execution:

- *Off-platform:* Expand integrations with external advertising platforms, design privacy-forward activation/identity workflows, and build measurement ingestion pipelines.
- *Data Collaboration (Cleanrooms):* Extend cleanroom orchestration and governance tooling, develop query templates, and optimize pipelines for cost and performance.
- *Ads Taxonomy:* Lead intake automation (UI + backend) and release workflow improvements.
- *Platform:* Drive platform modernization, developer tooling improvements, and on-call/SLO strategies.

• AI-First Engineering: Use AI-assisted tools daily for design, coding, tests, and documentation; define team prompt patterns; identify internal AI automation opportunities.
• Product Quality, Privacy & Security: Translate ambiguous requirements into pragmatic phases with clear SLAs/SLOs. Champion security-by-design, data governance, and privacy compliance (GDPR/CCPA).
• Mentorship & Collaboration: Mentor engineers up to L5, set code review standards, and build cross-team partnerships.

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience (typically 10+ for this level) delivering and operating large-scale backend/data systems.
• Strong proficiency in Python and one of Ruby or Go.
• Experience building services/APIs (REST/gRPC) and third-party API integrations (e.g., Meta, Google, The Trade Desk).
• Hands-on data pipeline experience with dbt, Airflow, Spark/Databricks, and advanced SQL performance tuning.
• Production experience with Snowflake, AWS, workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal), and event-driven patterns.
• Experience with ad-tech/programmatic advertising, cleanrooms (Snowflake DCR), identity/matching (UID2, RampID), and data privacy compliance (GDPR/CCPA).
• Familiarity with CI/CD, containerization, testing strategies, Datadog observability, and SLOs.
• Demonstrated hands-on use of AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, OpenAI assistants) and reusable prompt design.
• Strong technical writing and stakeholder management skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience with UID2/TTD integrations, Roku/Pubmatic/NBCU, or Meta Advanced Analytics/Google ADH pipelines.
• Experience with catalog/taxonomy, entity lineage, or custom hierarchy systems.
• Snowflake governance patterns and partner data collaboration at scale.
• Experience managing vendors and partner external API certification programs.
• Background building AI-powered internal tools (e.g., Slackbots, data assistants).