Engineering Manager, Order Experience

Overview

Instacart is the North American leader in online grocery and one of the fastest-growing companies in e-commerce. Since 2012, we've been working toward creating a world where everyone has access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Behind every seamless order is a foundation of complex systems working in perfect coordination and the Order Experience team is at the heart of it all.

The Order Experience team owns some of the most mission-critical infrastructure at Instacart, including checkout architecture, order management, and post-order quality. These systems sit at the intersection of nearly every major product initiative across the company, making this team a foundational dependency for how Instacart delivers value to customers, shoppers, retailers, and brand partners alike.

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead this team of 8+ engineers and bring both strategic vision and hands-on technical leadership to a domain where reliability, scalability, and conversion all matter. This is a role for someone who thrives in complexity, knows how to balance long-term platform thinking with near-term shipping, and can navigate a high-volume, cross-functional environment with clarity and confidence.

About the Job

• Lead and grow an engineering organization of 8+ engineers responsible for checkout architecture, order management, and post-order quality. These systems are foundational to Instacart's core customer experience and directly impact conversion and reliability at scale.
• Serve as the primary engineering point of contact for 10+ partner teams across the organization, managing high-volume intake, setting clear prioritization frameworks, and ensuring Order Experience remains a reliable, well-scoped dependency for every major launch at Instacart.
• Drive platform thinking across the team by identifying opportunities to rebuild and modernize foundational systems without sacrificing the pace of shipping customer-facing value, and making principled trade-offs between short-term delivery and long-term architectural health.
• Own engineering execution end to end: from roadmap alignment and technical strategy to team health, hiring, and career development for a high-performing group of engineers navigating a fast-moving, high-stakes domain.
• Partner closely with product, design, data science, and cross-functional engineering leaders to define the future of order infrastructure to influence how Instacart scales its checkout and fulfillment systems as the business continues to grow.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in an engineering management role leading teams of 8 or more engineers
• Demonstrated experience owning and scaling backend systems in a high-traffic, production environment, including systems related to e-commerce, order management, checkout, or similar transactional domains
• Proven ability to manage complex cross-functional dependencies across multiple partner teams simultaneously, with strong prioritization and stakeholder communication skills
• Experience driving technical roadmaps that balance platform modernization with continuous product delivery in a fast-paced environment
• Track record of hiring, retaining, and developing engineering talent, including performance management and career growth conversations

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a high-growth e-commerce or marketplace company where engineering systems are directly tied to revenue and conversion outcomes
• Familiarity with checkout or payment infrastructure, order lifecycle management, or post-order quality systems at scale
• Strong platform and systems thinking, experience leading architectural migrations or re-platforming efforts while maintaining system reliability and team velocity
• Comfort operating as a force multiplier across a large, distributed organization where your team's systems enable the work of many others