Senior Software Engineering Manager

Summary

Join Instacart as a Senior Engineering Manager for Core Shopping Experiences and lead the engineering efforts behind Instacart’s shopping flow, from retailer selection to adding items to the cart. This role involves defining large-scale technical visions, overseeing the implementation of pivotal product features, and advancing system-level innovation. You will lead a growing team, own highly visible business-critical surfaces, and partner with key stakeholders to advance major product and engineering goals. The team focuses on item cards, health initiatives, discovery pages, and the search & recommender platform. This is a remote position with a competitive compensation and benefits package, including equity grants.

Requirements

• Proven track record leading teams in high-growth, fast-paced environments
• 4+ years managing a team of 10+ engineers across platforms like backend, iOS, Android, and web
• Expertise in technical vision development for scalable systems
• Experience in search, recommendation systems, or high-visibility client-facing products
• Data-informed decision-making grounded in technical rigor
• Exceptional cross-functional collaboration skills—easily communicating with PMs, ML engineers, and designers
• Familiarity with engineering excellence metrics (incidents, bugs, latency, scalability, quality assurance) and a track record of defining engineering quality north stars and holding teams accountable to outcomes

Responsibilities

• Define and execute a multi-year technical vision
• Guide system design at scale, enabling technical excellence to meet user and business needs
• Partner with L7+ engineers and technical peers to ensure cohesive systems spanning discovery, shopping, and recommendation
• Guide engineers in adopting best practices for design, development, and scalability
• Ensure delivery of high-quality systems with clear expectations on metrics like latency, incidents, reliability, and product polish
• Partner with cross-functional leaders (PM, ML, DS) to manage time-sensitive business needs and execute innovative projects
• Foster a culture where engineers find growth, pride, and ownership in their work
• Build an inclusive team while mentoring engineers across levels
• Lead hiring initiatives as the team expands its scope and ownership
• Partner with product managers, data scientists, and machine learning experts to balance short-term priorities with long-term technical strategy
• Ensure the team builds strong integration with personalization, ranking, and relevance systems managed by horizontal teams
• Act as a liaison for your team to represent ongoing progress, challenges, and solutions at the leadership and organizational level

Preferred Qualifications

• Technical expertise at the Staff+ level, with a background in systems architecture and scalable backend infrastructure
• Strong background in full-stack or backend systems, with knowledge of API design for client integrations
• Experience balancing urgent business goals with long-term technical strategy
• Experience building robust engineering excellence processes involving latency, bugs, scalability, and quality goals

Benefits

• 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
• 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