Staff Product Design - Lifecycle and Growth

Every year, people across the world spend nearly one trillion dollars on groceries. It’s an industry that’s been around for centuries. Food itself, however, has been a constant in people’s lives since the beginning of time. Yes, sustenance is essential, but it’s also much more than that. Food can be a part of a daily ritual or a special moment that resonates with people on a meaningful and emotional level. It can be a much-needed break in a long day, a taste that brings back memories, a creative experiment, a shared meal with loved ones, or even comfort during a hard time. Whether it’s a special occasion or an everyday occurrence, it should always be easy for people to get the ingredients they need.

The Instacart Design Team is dedicated to making grocery shopping effortless for everyone and finding solutions to large-scale opportunities that will forever change the way people feed themselves and their loved ones. We’re a four sided marketplace and design for the needs of Consumer, Shoppers, Retailers, and Advertisers.

We’re hiring a Staff Product Designer to elevate the end-to-end experience across Instacart’s Lifecycle & Growth ecosystem—shaping how customers discover, evaluate, commit to, and build an ongoing relationship with Instacart. You’ll operate at a system level, connecting work across teams to create a cohesive, intuitive, and emotionally resonant experience. This role is as much about elevating visual craft and defining a clear design language as it is about aligning product, marketing, and brand into a unified strategy.

Beyond onboarding, engagement, and subscriptions, you’ll design for motivation—shaping how customers perceive value, respond to incentives, and build lasting habits. You’ll partner closely with Product, Engineering, Marketing, Brand, Data Science, and Research to drive meaningful business impact while strengthening trust and loyalty. While this role is remote, the design lead for this pillar is based in NYC, one of our two in-person hubs.

Daily Rhythms and Samples of Work:

• Elevate the end-to-end experience across Lifecycle & Growth, connecting in-product and out-of-product touchpoints into a cohesive system—from onboarding and engagement to incentives, subscriptions, and CRM. Align cross-team initiatives into a unified strategy that strengthens comprehension, trust, and long-term value.
• Shape the experience across the core grocery app and broader lifecycle ecosystem, ensuring consistency from first-time use through repeat behavior across product, CRM, and marketing touchpoints. Connect work across home, browse, cart, checkout, post-order, and out-of-product surfaces into a clear, system-level narrative.
• Define and evolve experience frameworks that unify journeys and initiatives across teams and channels, articulating how in-product and out-of-product touchpoints ladder into a broader system and strategy.
• Identify gaps and opportunities across the ecosystem, proactively shaping new directions that unlock step-change improvements in growth, engagement, and retention.
• Codify experiential principles—functional and emotional—to guide what users should understand, decide, and feel across flows, and translate those principles into patterns, content hierarchies, and interaction rules that can scale across teams.
• Use AI-assisted prototyping and concept development as a core part of your practice—providing strong art direction, references, and experiential intent to generate flows and concepts that align with Instacart’s design system, brand positioning, and evolving interaction patterns.
• Shape content, hierarchy, and information architecture across product and lifecycle touchpoints, ensuring clarity and consistency across in-app experiences, CRM, and marketing surfaces while balancing user needs, business goals, and partner visibility.
• Design for visual clarity, pacing, and density—establishing patterns, grids, and rules that govern how modules, carousels, and key placements work (e.g., above vs. below the fold/break) to balance user needs, business objectives, and partner value.
• Work with Research (and sometimes lead or plan research yourself) to uncover insights about meals, nutrition, health goals, and lifecycle behaviors, then translate those insights into concrete journey maps, flows, and experiential principles.
• Craft narratives, naming, and value propositions across product and lifecycle touchpoints—creating artifacts that align teams internally and inform how experiences are communicated externally to customers.
• Raise the bar for experience-led thinking across the pod(s)—mentoring partners on how to think in journeys and emotions, not just screens, and advocating for cohesive, principle-driven experiences that feel uniquely Instacart.

Minimum Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience designing consumer-facing digital products across web and mobile, with a portfolio demonstrating complex, multi-step journeys, end-to-end systems, and integrated marketing channels (e.g., CRM, campaigns, social).
• Driven by continuity, cohesion, and clarity, with an exceptional eye for visual craft, content hierarchy, and design system detail.
• Strong track record of shaping work across multiple design disciplines (content, UX/product, visual, strategy, research), with depth in at least two and the ability to connect them into cohesive, system-level outcomes.
• Strong visual and interface design background, with experience in consumer-facing product or brand design. Ability to drive cohesion, continuity, and the ongoing evolution of a design language across multiple surfaces and touchpoints. Experience partnering with design systems teams while applying and evolving those systems within product experiences.
• Proven ability to partner with product and business leaders to define direction, align teams, and drive work from concept through execution—across briefs, iteration, testing, and executive reviews.
• Deep curiosity for human behavior, food, shopping, and culture, with a strong point of view on how these translate into compelling, differentiated product experiences. 
• Exceptional communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to frame complex problems, influence decisions, and drive alignment through clear narratives and compelling presentations. 
• Demonstrated experience delivering brand-forward product experiences grounded in user insights, data, and clear business impact.
• Track record of navigating ambiguity and influencing across multi-team environments, connecting fragmented efforts into cohesive strategies and outcomes.
• Fluency in google slides and figma is a must with desire for additional design or generative tools including but not limited to: Claude Code, Loveable, Cursor, and ChatGPT.
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing for marketplaces, e-commerce, grocery, CPG, or subscription products—especially in environments where lifecycle, growth, and repeat behavior are critical.
• Experience shaping onboarding, activation, and retention experiences, with a strong understanding of how incentives, perceived value, and personalization drive behavior, habit formation, and long-term loyalty.
• Familiarity with domains like meal planning, nutrition, health goals, and personalization, and how they intersect with household grocery behavior.
• Experience designing high-visibility surfaces such as home, personalized feeds, and merchandising placements, with a strong point of view on hierarchy, density, and visual clarity across complex, content-rich environments.
• Experience working within and evolving large-scale design systems, ensuring both AI- and human-generated experiences align to system principles while elevating overall craft and coherence.
• Comfort operating across distributed, cross-functional teams, influencing multi-team initiatives and connecting work into cohesive, system-level outcomes without direct authority.

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