Director of Software Engineering, Instacart

• This role demands exceptional cross-organizational dependency management: Order Experience is a critical dependency for nearly every major launch at Instacart
• 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

Desirable

• Instacart is seeking an experienced Director of Engineering to lead our Order Experience organization—Cart & Checkout, Order Status Page, Order Quality, Shopping Lists, and Family accounts
• This organization powers the transaction engine behind our four-sided marketplace, directly impacting billions of dollars in GTV and millions of customers daily
• As Director of Order Experience, you will lead a 20-25 person engineering organization and own complex, mission-critical systems including checkout architecture, payments integration, order management, and post-order quality
• You'll manage high-volume intake from 10+ partner teams while maintaining system reliability, optimizing conversion, and building for the future
• Success requires strategic prioritization, platform thinking, and the ability to rebuild foundations while shipping customer value
• 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