Senior Engineering Manager, Retailer Discovery Experience

Overview

About the Role - As the Senior Engineering Manager for the Retailer Discovery Experience team, you’ll be at the forefront of enabling customers to discover, explore, and shop across thousands of retailers seamlessly. This team powers critical, high-impact surfaces like Home, Cross Retailer Search, and the Store Directory—all pivotal entry points for Instacart’s users. Your leadership will shape not just the team’s growth but also key aspects of the Instacart user journey, contributing to enhanced affordability, retention, and marketplace growth.

You will guide your team in delivering innovative, scalable, and reliable systems that fuel affordability improvements, drive retailer discovery, and create seamless multi-retailer shopping experiences. From crafting a technical vision to ensuring engineering excellence, your work will impact millions of users and usher in the next chapter of Instacart's growth.

About the Team - The Retailer Discovery Experience team sits within the Shopping Org in core Instacart App org (Online Grocery) and serves as the backbone of Instacart’s commitment to connecting users across a growing network of retailers. This high-performing, feature-oriented, and business-critical team excels in delivering projects that directly shape Instacart’s affordability, user satisfaction, and product visibility goals.

• Team Size & Structure: Currently comprising 8 engineers, the team will grow to 12 in the coming months, with a healthy mix of junior and senior talent. You’ll lead a rapidly scaling team that thrives on cross-collaboration and high visibility.
• Key Achievements: Successfully improved retention through affordability initiatives, streamlined app navigation for seasonal and restaurant use cases, and expanded categories outside of grocery.

As a leader of this team, you’ll work with talented engineers, standout PMs, and cross-functional collaborators to continue to raise the bar for innovation and execution at Instacart.

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 communicate the team’s technical strategy in alignment with company-wide product objectives.
• Drive the vision for long-term architectural investments and execution excellence.
• Create high-impact roadmaps for systems that optimize for scalability, performance, and user experience.
• 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 Development:
• Champion a strong team culture, where engineers take pride in their work and find growth opportunities.
• Manage team health, performance, and career development through 1:1 coaching, feedback, and mentorship.
• Lead hiring to grow an inclusive, high-performing team aligned with Instacart’s goals.
• Partnership & Collaboration:
• Foster cross-team alignment by building relationships with Product, Design, Data Science, and Marketing peers.
• Act as a liaison for your team to represent ongoing progress, challenges, and solutions at the leadership and organizational level.

Key Focus Areas:

• Retailer Discovery: Enhancing the discoverability of all retailers across the Instacart platform.
• Cross-Retailer Search: Optimizing product search experiences that drive additional use cases and category adoption.
• Home Feed Curation: Empowering personalized, diverse user experiences via seamless navigation and intelligent merchandising.

About You

Minimum Qualifications:

• Proven experience as a hands-on technical leader or engineering manager in a high-growth, fast-paced environment.
• 4+ years managing teams of 10+ engineers.
• Proficiency in designing and executing multi-year engineering roadmaps.
• 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.
• Experience partnering with PM, data science, design, and ML to deliver on time-sensitive and high-visibility initiatives.
• Exceptional communication skills, with a focus on structured, clarity-first communication across stakeholders.
• Experience mentoring talent, fostering team health, and creating a positive engineering culture.

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.
• Familiarity or experience working with Machine Learning-focused products.
• Experience balancing urgent business goals with long-term technical strategy.
• Ability to lead in high-pressure, high-visibility situations while creating stability for the team.

Why Instacart?

Joining Instacart means contributing to one of the most critical entry points in our user journey and the broader shopping ecosystem. Your work won't just help our users find what they need—it’ll establish Instacart as the go-to marketplace for impactful retailer and product discovery. Additionally, you’ll work across a high-output, motivated group with a strong record of hitting and exceeding goals.

Are you ready to roll up your sleeves and guide a cross-functional team to tackle some of our most complex, meaningful challenges? Let’s grow the pie—together.