Senior Software Engineer - Ads Manager

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 Ads Manager team builds the core self-serve platform that brands, agencies, and retailers use to create, manage, and optimize their advertising campaigns on Instacart. We own the services, APIs, and data models behind campaign creation, creative management, and reporting, along with the advertiser-facing experiences built on top of them. Our work serves the advertisers who drive Instacart's main revenue, and there is tremendous room to grow. We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer (IC5) to own high-impact initiatives such as ads web observability and North Star metrics and automated AI review for ads formats.

About the Job

• Lead and deliver projects end to end, from design through launch, that improve advertiser activation, platform health, and ad revenue growth.
• Design, build, and operate scalable, well-tested services and APIs that power campaign management and reporting, reaching into the frontend where needed.
• Partner with product managers and engineers inside and outside Ads Manager to turn ambiguous requirements into well-scoped plans.
• Define key architectural patterns, write and review system design documents, and improve observability and system reliability.
• Mentor junior engineers and raise the bar for code quality through thoughtful code review.
• Contribute to recruiting and improve team processes.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong experience building and operating backend services and APIs in a modern web framework such as Ruby on Rails or Go.
• Solid understanding of relational databases and SQL, including data modeling and query performance.
• Experience designing for scale, reliability, and maintainability across distributed systems.
• Comfortable working across the stack, including integrating with frontend applications.
• Self-starter and self-motivated, able to unblock yourself and drive work forward independently.
• Strong analytical and debugging skills, with a sense of ownership for production systems.
• Clear communicator who collaborates well with engineers, designers, and PMs across multiple teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior work experience in the digital advertising industry or on self-serve platforms.
• Experience designing and versioning public or partner-facing APIs (REST or GraphQL).
• Experience with asynchronous processing and messaging systems such as Kafka or Sidekiq.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and tooling (AWS, Terraform, Datadog or similar).
• Experience with React or TypeScript, and with integrating ML or AI capabilities into products.

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