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
About the Role - As the Senior Engineering Manager for Core Shopping Experiences, you will steer the engineering efforts behind Instacart’s shopping flow—from the moment a retailer is selected to the addition of items to the cart. These are some of Instacart’s most visible and impactful surfaces, and this team owns experience design, backend systems, and foundational architecture that power them. Your team’s work will directly shape millions of shopping journeys, improving affordability, usability, and customer engagement.
This is an opportunity to define large-scale technical visions, oversee the implementation of pivotal product features, and advance system-level innovation. Additionally, you’ll help build the next generation of our AI-first search and recommender systems, a major strategic focus for the company.
About the Team - The Core Shopping Experiences team sits within the Shopping org—one of Instacart’s most dynamic and business-critical groups. With a recently expanded team of 12 engineers covering backend, iOS, Android, and web platforms, the team takes pride in its ability to deliver customer-facing features that marry technical sophistication with business outcomes.
Collaborating closely with peers across product, data science, machine learning, and design, you’ll be instrumental in crafting cutting-edge shopping experiences that deliver relevant and personalized experiences to delight customers.
About the Job
In this role, you will lead a growing team, own highly visible business-critical surfaces, and partner with key stakeholders to advance major product and engineering goals. Responsibilities will include:
- Leadership & Strategy:
- 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.
- Engineering Excellence:
- 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.
- Team Building & Development:
- 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.
- Partnership & Collaboration:
- 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.
Key Focus Areas:
- Item Cards: A foundational component critical to every shopping journey.
- Health Initiatives: Continuing to drive outsized user value by delivering on Instacart’s health-focused vision.
- Discovery Pages: Deliver innovative, personalized experiences for Instacart users.
Platform: Guide the next stage of evolution of our Search & Recommender stack.
About You
Minimum Qualifications:
- 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.
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.
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.
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 US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.
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