The opportunity
The Shopper Activation & Engagement team at Instacart owns core moments in the shopper lifecycle, including onboarding, activation, finding work, evaluating and accepting batches, staying compliant, understanding earnings-related experiences, and remaining engaged on the…
What you'll do
Lead Shopper Activation & Engagement end-to-end, owning the team's operating: model, roadmap execution, technical direction, and talent strategy across mobile, backend, compliance, marketplace efficiency, vendor-integrated systems, engineering foundations, and operational excellence. You will bring structure, velocity, and clarity to a broad product engineering surface that directly impacts shoppers and the Instacart marketplace.
Drive multi-quarter roadmap planning and sequencing across competing: priorities — including compliance deadlines, marketplace and product growth initiatives, vendor work, engineering foundations, and reactive KTLO. Several workstreams carry hard regulatory, vendor, and marketplace deadlines that require confident, decisive leadership.
Partner deeply across a wide set of cross-functional stakeholders: including Product, Design, Data, Legal/Compliance, Operations, Marketing, Logistics, Matching/Dispatch, Payments/Transactions, Trust & Safety, and Customer Experience — to align on the highest-impact work and negotiate tradeoffs with rigor and transparency.
Develop and retain engineering talent across a team of 10–12 engineers,: supporting senior engineers through career growth, performance management, talent planning, and organizational change. You will play a central role in building a strong team culture rooted in velocity, iteration, engineering excellence, and responsible AI-assisted development.
Set the technical direction for the team: driving improvements in reliability, observability, on-call hygiene, incident response, and post-incident learning, while also advancing the team's ability to move faster through modern AI developer tools and AI-assisted engineering workflows.
+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 5+ years: managing software engineers through hiring, performance management, career development, and calibration.
What they're looking for
- Experience leading customer, shopper, contractor, merchant, or workforce: onboarding, activation, engagement, retention, or trust and safety surfaces.
- Background working on multi-sided marketplace systems, particularly across: supply quality, availability, incentives, eligibility, matching and batching, and marketplace efficiency.
- Experience leading mobile-heavy product areas with close partnership across: mobile, backend, Product, Design, Data, and Operations.
- Familiarity with AI/ML product integration and how to drive responsible: adoption of AI-assisted development practices within engineering teams.
- Hands-on experience with technical environments such as Ruby on Rails,: Python, Golang, Postgres, Redis, AWS, or comparable infrastructure.
