Senior Engineering Manager, Retailer Platform
Job description
We're transforming the grocery industry
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. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.
Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.
Instacart is a Flex First team
There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.
Overview
Enterprise Foundations is the engineering team responsible for the architectural and integration work that allows Instacart's Retailer Platform to scale across the world's largest grocers. Our work spans omnichannel integrations — bringing products like FoodStorm catering and Caper Carts onto unified Instacart platform rails — enterprise extensibility (sandbox environments, configuration systems, retailer-facing tooling), and the cross-cutting data isolation work that allows Instacart's ML and Data Engineering teams to safely build per-retailer models on top of the platform. As Instacart's enterprise retail business expands to hundreds of partner brands and new international markets, this team's work is foundational to how the platform matures.
We are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead this team of ~12 engineers. You'll set the unifying technical thesis for the team — multi-tenancy, data isolation, configuration-driven release management, and per-retailer extensibility — and drive the consolidation work that replaces bespoke per-vertical services with shared platform rails. In close partnership with Connected Stores, Pro Services, Commerce, Data Engineering, and ML, you'll broker the architectural and prioritization trade-offs that determine how Instacart serves enterprise retailers across multiple commerce surfaces.
About the Job
- Lead, coach, and grow a senior-skewed team of ~12 engineers across multiple workstreams; set clear architectural and execution direction, develop talent, and foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
- Set and maintain the unifying technical thesis for the team — multi-tenancy, data isolation, configuration-driven release management, and per-retailer extensibility — ensuring related workstreams converge on shared solutions rather than parallel implementations.
- Drive consolidation of bespoke retailer-vertical services — catering order management, smart-cart backend logic, kiosk integrations, in-store mobile — onto unified Instacart platform rails, so each surface inherits Instacart's ranking, search, recommendations, and fulfillment.
- Partner with ML and Data Engineering on long-term enterprise data platform compliance for our ML systems, ensuring per-retailer model training has the data, signals, and isolation it needs.
- Deliver self-service tooling — including sandbox environments, configuration interfaces, and retailer-facing extensibility — that lets retailers and internal teams ship without engineering bottlenecks.
- Represent technical and product trade-offs across multiple engineering and product organizations whose roadmaps and integration commitments evolve in real time; broker resourcing decisions, drive clarity in ambiguous scope, and ensure engineering investment stays aligned with committed work.
About You
Minimum Qualifications
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years managing engineering teams delivering platform or infrastructure products in a B2B or enterprise context.
- Experience leading teams of 10+ engineers, including hiring, performance management, and career development of senior individual contributors.
- Demonstrated success operating in ambiguous, high-growth environments where partner roadmaps, product coverage, and integration commitments are still maturing — with a track record of driving clarity and forward motion through that ambiguity.
- Proven cross-functional leadership influencing outcomes across multiple engineering and product organizations, including comfort using structured escalation to unblock multi-team initiatives.
- Experience leading multi-team architectural transitions such as consolidation, replatforming, multi-tenancy, or data isolation inside an established business with real customers and revenue.
- Technical proficiency in distributed systems, API/SDK design, and cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS or GCP).
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred Qualifications
- Direct domain experience in commerce platforms, omnichannel retail, OMS, POS, catering systems, or connected-store / in-store technology.
- Track record of building multi-tenant platforms serving multiple internal or external customers, with per-tenant configuration, isolation, and extensibility requirements.
- Experience partnering with ML and Data Engineering teams on data platform compliance, model training infrastructure, or data isolation initiatives.
- Background scaling enterprise integrations and managing partner-facing technical relationships across product, engineering, and customer-facing functions.
- Experience leading other engineering managers and growing two-layer organizations.
#LI-Remote
Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here.
Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.
For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.