Senior Engineering Manager, Activation & Engagement

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Lead Shopper Activation & Engagement end-to-end: operating model, roadmap execution, technical direction, and talent strategy
• ▹Drive multi-quarter roadmap planning and sequencing across competing priorities (compliance, marketplace growth, vendor work, engineering foundations, KTLO)
• ▹Partner deeply across cross-functional stakeholders (Product, Design, Data, Legal/Compliance, Operations, Marketing, Logistics, Matching/Dispatch, Payments, Trust & Safety, Customer Experience)
• ▹Develop and retain engineering talent across a 10-12 engineer team
• ▹Set technical direction: reliability, observability, on-call hygiene, incident response, and AI-assisted development

Requirements

• ▹8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 5+ years managing engineers through hiring, performance management, and calibration
• ▹Experience leading product engineering teams across mobile, backend, and operationally sensitive systems
• ▹Strong technical judgment across distributed systems, reliability, observability, on-call, and incident response
• ▹Demonstrated ability to define, sequence, and deliver multi-quarter roadmaps across competing priorities
• ▹Proven ability to lead cross-functional planning and negotiation with Product, Design, Legal/Compliance, Operations, Marketing, Data, and infrastructure partners
• ▹Experience managing a broad ownership surface: legacy systems, cross-team dependencies, ambiguous requirements
• ▹Strong people leadership track record, retaining and developing senior engineers through organizational change
• ▹Experience using AI developer tools or AI-assisted engineering workflows to improve velocity and quality

Nice to have

• ▹Experience leading onboarding, activation, engagement, retention, or trust & safety surfaces
• ▹Background on multi-sided marketplace systems: supply quality, availability, incentives, matching and batching
• ▹Experience leading mobile-heavy product areas with close cross-functional partnership
• ▹Familiarity with AI/ML product integration and responsible AI adoption in engineering teams
• ▹Hands-on experience with Ruby on Rails, Python, Golang, Postgres, Redis, AWS, or comparable infrastructure

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹New hire equity grant plus annual refresh equity grants

About the company

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry, delivering groceries and household goods while offering flexible earning opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers. Instacart follows a Flex First approach, letting employees choose where they work best.