Director of Software Engineering, Order Experience

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry and is seeking an experienced Director of Engineering to lead their Order Experience organization. This role involves managing a team of engineers and overseeing mission-critical systems that impact customer transactions and operational excellence.

Responsibilities:

• Manage high-volume intake from 10+ partner organizations (Ads, Growth, Partnerships, Fulfillment, Platform, Home) who depend on Order Experience for critical launches; balance competing priorities, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and establish intake governance processes for request triage, effort estimation, and delivery commitments
• Own the vision and multi-quarter roadmap for Order Experience, balancing customer trust, operational excellence, conversion optimization, and technical foundation investments; drive architectural decisions for foundational systems and champion approaches that reduce implementation complexity across platforms
• Lead, mentor, and scale an organization of ~30 engineers across Cart & Checkout, Order Status Page, Order Quality, and Shopping Lists; hire an Engineering Manager and Senior II Engineers (L6), build out your leadership team, and grow existing engineers through mentorship and stretch projects
• Raise the technical bar across backend services (Ruby, Python), mobile (iOS, Android), web, and full-stack systems; ensure reliability, scalability, security, and performance for high-volume, revenue-critical systems that process millions of orders
• Establish operational excellence with clear OKRs, predictable delivery, strong on-call practices, incident response, and post-mortems; champion technical investments in checkout architecture modernization, system observability, and reducing technical debt
• Own key business metrics including checkout conversion, cart abandonment, order completion rate, order quality, and customer satisfaction; drive experiments and data-driven decision-making to optimize for GTV, customer retention, and operational cost
• Partner closely with the Commerce Platform team to build shared expertise in payments, orders, and pricing systems; drive end-to-end execution in partnership with Product, Design, Data Science, Operations, and peer engineering leaders across Shopping, Ads, Growth, and Platform

Requirements:

• Expert cross-organizational dependency management and intake prioritization in high-velocity environments where your systems are critical dependencies for multiple teams (this is the #1 requirement)
• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience with 5+ years managing engineers, including at least 2+ years leading managers or organizations of 20+ engineers
• Proven experience managing platform teams that enable other engineering organizations; demonstrated ability to balance partner requests with technical health and core roadmap
• Track record evolving legacy systems toward extensibility and self-service to reduce bottlenecks and enable team independence
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and high-availability, high-throughput systems (payments, transactions, order management)
• Strong ability to recruit, hire, and develop senior engineering talent (L5-L6) and Engineering Managers; build organizational bench strength and develop ICs into leaders
• Demonstrated ability to influence and align stakeholders across Product, Design, Data Science, and Operations
• Experience with e-commerce, payments, checkout, or transaction systems
• Track record building or rebuilding engineering teams through transitions
• Experience hiring and developing Engineering Managers
• Background in mobile and web development (iOS, Android, React, GraphQL)
• Experience leading re-architecture efforts that reduce platform fragmentation and enable faster iteration cycles
• Experience with modern checkout paradigms including conversational interfaces, AI-assisted flows, or approaches that simplify cross-platform development
• Familiarity with experimentation platforms and A/B testing at scale
• Experience with Golang, Ruby on Rails, Python, or similar backend frameworks