Senior Engineering Manager, Activation & Engagement

The Shopper Activation & Engagement team at Instacart owns core moments in the shopper lifecycle, including onboarding, activation, finding work, evaluating and accepting batches, compliance, earnings, and engagement. We are looking for a Senior Manager, Software Engineering to lead a team of 10–12 engineers across mobile, backend, vendor-integrated systems, and engineering foundations. This leader will shape strategy, execution, technical direction, and talent development while partnering with Product, Design, Data, Operations, Legal/Compliance, and other cross-functional teams.

• Lead Shopper Activation & Engagement end-to-end, owning operating model, roadmap execution, technical direction, and talent strategy.
• Drive multi-quarter roadmap planning and sequencing across competing priorities, including compliance deadlines, marketplace growth, vendor work, engineering foundations, and KTLO.
• Partner with cross-functional stakeholders to align on highest-impact work and negotiate tradeoffs.
• Develop and retain engineering talent across a team of 10–12 engineers, supporting senior engineers through career growth and performance management.
• Set technical direction for reliability, observability, on-call hygiene, incident response, and post-incident learning, while advancing AI-assisted engineering workflows.

Minimum: 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 5+ years managing software engineers. Experience leading product engineering teams across mobile, backend, and operationally sensitive systems. Strong technical judgment across distributed systems, service ownership, reliability, observability, and incident response. Demonstrated ability to deliver multi-quarter roadmaps. Proven cross-functional leadership. Experience with modern AI developer tools.

Preferred: Experience with shopper/contractor onboarding, activation, engagement, or trust and safety. Background in multi-sided marketplace systems. Mobile-heavy product areas. Familiarity with AI/ML product integration. Hands-on experience with Ruby on Rails, Python, Golang, Postgres, Redis, AWS, or comparable infrastructure.

This role is remote and eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. For Canadian based candidates, the base pay range is CAN$229,000—$241,500 CAD. Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits.