Sarah Woods

Software Engineer at Instacart · Distributed databases · Raft, performance engineering

Instacart

San Francisco, CA · PT (UTC-8)

1+ years experience

Stanford University

English

Open to work

Messaging unavailable

Overview

Software Engineer at Instacart, focused on distributed databases. Mentored 11 engineers through their first promotion. Most at home with C++ and Raft. Learning Japanese, slowly.

Good reasons to reach out

Roles in distributed databases
Speaking or podcast invitations
Thoughtful intros to people in my field

Please don't message about

Unpaid work or spec projects
Courses and coaching offers

Fastest replies in the morning

Skills

performance engineeringRustRaftconsensusC++RocksDB

Open to workLooking for a role

closes in 3 months

Staff Software Engineer roles in banking - San Francisco or remote

Target roles: Staff Software Engineer
Level: Staff / Principal
Industries: B2B SaaS, Healthtech
Work mode: On-site
Available: From next quarter
Work authorization: Authorized to work in the CA
What I'm looking for: A team that ships weekly and owns storage end to end.
Not interested in: Night shifts

1 years in distributed databases. Strongest at Rust and C++. Available immediately.

San Francisco, CA · remote OKc++rocksdbraft

Open

Experience

Software Engineer
Dec 2025 - Present
Instacart · 10 mo · Full-time · San Francisco, CA
- Moved 62% of storage traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.
- Brought on-call pages for storage down from 15 a week to 3.

Projects

Side project: a budgeting app

2025

Built with consensus and RocksDB. 148 people used it last year.

Distributed databases benchmark

2024

Reproducible benchmarks comparing consensus and performance engineering on real workloads.

References

No references yet.

Education

Stanford University
BS, Information Technology
2020 - 2024

Details

Compensation expectations

What they are targeting for their next role.

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Direct contact details

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