Senior Engineering Manager, Software — Carrot Ads Platform

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by delivering essential services to customers and providing flexible earnings opportunities to Personal Shoppers. They are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team of engineers in developing the Carrot Ads platform, focusing on stability, reliability, and product development.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, coach, and grow a team of 10–12 software engineers; set clear goals, develop talent, and foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement
• Own platform reliability and scalability end-to-end; define and meet SLAs/SLOs, improve observability, reduce incident frequency and time-to-recovery, and raise the overall bar for quality
• Oversee enterprise partner integrations and launch readiness; drive efficient onboarding, manage technical escalations, and ensure smooth operations across multiple high-stakes stakeholders
• Shape strategy and roadmap by synthesizing customer feedback, market and competitive insights, and internal priorities; translate long-term bets into executable plans across Serving, Measurement, Quality, and Ads Manager teams
• Elevate engineering excellence with robust testing, CI/CD, performance optimization, and data-driven decision-making; deliver measurable business impact on a predictable cadence in a fast-moving environment
• Invest in self-service platform capabilities and tooling that reduce operational burden, improve partner autonomy, and unlock efficient scale

Requirements:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years managing engineering teams delivering platform or infrastructure products in a B2B or enterprise SaaS environment
• Experience leading teams of 8+ engineers, including hiring, performance management, and career development
• Demonstrated success operating in ambiguous, high-growth settings while balancing reactive partner needs with long-term platform investments
• Proven cross-functional leadership driving outcomes across multiple engineering teams and stakeholders to deliver complex, multi-quarter roadmaps
• Direct domain experience in ad tech, retail media, or publisher-facing platforms
• Technical proficiency with distributed systems and cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS or GCP), along with data and ads-adjacent technologies (e.g., event streaming, experimentation, measurement)
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience scaling enterprise integrations and managing partner-facing technical relationships and SLAs
• Track record of building self-service platform capabilities and tooling that significantly reduce manual operations
• Comfort applying market and competitive analysis to inform engineering strategy and investment decisions
• Background with advertising serving, measurement/attribution, or campaign management systems
• Experience establishing reliability practices at scale (e.g., SLO frameworks, incident management, on-call health, post-incident learning loops)