The opportunity
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.
What you'll do
Own the full AI engagement arc . From first discovery through sustained: workflow adoption — serving as the external partner's single point of contact across every phase while driving scope, timelines, milestones, and escalations and keeping cross-functional workstreams aligned and moving. There is no "launch and hand off" in this model.
Drive requirements and delivery precision. Shape engagement structure, align: on objectives, translate partner needs into a clear execution plan, and track against it with rigor. Surface risks early and keep stakeholders — partner and internal — ahead of problems, not behind them.
Champion continuous quality. In AI engagements there's no single gate: value is proven iteratively. You oversee the testing and feedback loops that ensure the platform is performing against real partner workflows, track adoption progress, and stay on top of the change management work that determines whether a deployment becomes a lasting behavior change.
Hold the R&D feedback loop. You are accountable for ensuring field learnings: flow back to R&D and that R&D delivers on agreed roadmap commitments. When either side of the loop breaks down, you own the escalation.
Build playbooks. Identify reusable patterns across engagements and turn them: into scalable delivery frameworks the whole pod can use. We are early; what you build now will become the foundation for how this team operates at scale.
Own engagement economics. Track the full cost structure of every active: engagement — resource allocation across the pod, time spent per workstream, and cost card inputs — and maintain a running view of cost-to-deliver across the portfolio. Surface cost/benefit signals to inform prioritization and go/no-go decisions on new engagements. As the pod scales, your cost data becomes the foundation for delivery efficiency benchmarks.
What they're looking for
- This is a field-first role. Travel is part of the job: expect to be on-site at partner locations during key engagement phases, with travel that could reach 50%+ at peak. Presence matters in this model.
- + years in technical project management, enterprise engagement management, or: a related field — with a track record of delivering complex, multi-stakeholder technical programs end to end to external enterprise clientele.
- Demonstrated experience managing programs across the full software: development lifecycle — from requirements definition and scoping through build, test, and launch — including the ability to identify and manage risk, develop detailed work plans, and allocate resources across concurrent workstreams.
- Technical fluency sufficient to hold credible conversations with partner: engineering teams, understand AI/ML implementations and integration dependencies, and manage technically complex delivery workstreams without being the technical expert in the room.