Senior Engineering Manager, Activation & Engagement

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

The Shopper Activation & Engagement team at Instacart owns core moments in the shopper lifecycle, including onboarding, activation, finding work, evaluating and accepting batches, staying compliant, understanding earnings-related experiences, and remaining engaged on the platform. The team's work directly supports shopper experience, supply quality, marketplace efficiency, operational reliability, and compliance.

We are looking for a Senior Manager, Software Engineering to lead a team of 10–12 engineers across mobile, backend, vendor-integrated systems, and engineering foundations. This leader will shape the team's strategy, execution model, technical direction, and talent development while partnering closely with Product, Design, Data, Operations, Legal/Compliance, and other cross-functional teams.

This is a high-impact role for someone who thrives in broad, fast-moving product engineering environments where technical, operational, marketplace, and regulatory decisions all matter. You will help build reliable, scalable systems that make it easier for shoppers to succeed and help Instacart's marketplace operate efficiently at scale.

About the Job

• Lead Shopper Activation & Engagement end-to-end, owning the team's operating model, roadmap execution, technical direction, and talent strategy across mobile, backend, compliance, marketplace efficiency, vendor-integrated systems, engineering foundations, and operational excellence. You will bring structure, velocity, and clarity to a broad product engineering surface that directly impacts shoppers and the Instacart marketplace.
• Drive multi-quarter roadmap planning and sequencing across competing priorities — including compliance deadlines, marketplace and product growth initiatives, vendor work, engineering foundations, and reactive KTLO. Several workstreams carry hard regulatory, vendor, and marketplace deadlines that require confident, decisive leadership.
• Partner deeply across a wide set of cross-functional stakeholders — including Product, Design, Data, Legal/Compliance, Operations, Marketing, Logistics, Matching/Dispatch, Payments/Transactions, Trust & Safety, and Customer Experience — to align on the highest-impact work and negotiate tradeoffs with rigor and transparency.
• Develop and retain engineering talent across a team of 10–12 engineers, supporting senior engineers through career growth, performance management, talent planning, and organizational change. You will play a central role in building a strong team culture rooted in velocity, iteration, engineering excellence, and responsible AI-assisted development.
• Set the technical direction for the team — driving improvements in reliability, observability, on-call hygiene, incident response, and post-incident learning, while also advancing the team's ability to move faster through modern AI developer tools and AI-assisted engineering workflows.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 5+ years managing software engineers through hiring, performance management, career development, and calibration.
• Experience leading product engineering teams across mobile applications, backend services, and operationally sensitive systems.
• Strong technical judgment across distributed systems, service ownership, mobile product delivery, reliability, observability, on-call, incident response, and post-incident learning.
• Demonstrated ability to define, sequence, and deliver multi-quarter roadmaps across competing priorities, including compliance, marketplace and product growth, vendor work, engineering foundations, and KTLO.
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional planning and negotiation with Product, Design, Legal/Compliance, Operations, Marketing, Data, and platform and infrastructure partners.
• Experience managing a broad ownership surface area involving legacy systems, cross-team dependencies, ambiguous requirements, and shifting business priorities.
• Strong people leadership track record, including retaining and developing senior engineers and maintaining team health through periods of organizational change.
• Experience using modern AI developer tools or AI-assisted engineering workflows to improve engineering velocity, code quality, testing, operational efficiency, or team leverage.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading customer, shopper, contractor, merchant, or workforce onboarding, activation, engagement, retention, or trust and safety surfaces.
• Background working on multi-sided marketplace systems, particularly across supply quality, availability, incentives, eligibility, matching and batching, and marketplace efficiency.
• Experience leading mobile-heavy product areas with close partnership across mobile, backend, Product, Design, Data, and Operations.
• Familiarity with AI/ML product integration and how to drive responsible adoption of AI-assisted development practices within engineering teams.
• Hands-on experience with technical environments such as Ruby on Rails, Python, Golang, Postgres, Redis, AWS, or comparable infrastructure.

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