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.