Senior Engineering Manager, Software - Carrot Ads Platform

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

Carrot Ads is Instacart 's publisher advertising platform — powering ad serving, monetization, and measurement for enterprise retail partners. It's one of Instacart 's most strategically important and fastest-growing businesses, and we're at an inflection point: moving from early externalization to a platform that meets the expectations of the world's most sophisticated retailers. To get there, we've formed a dedicated Carrot Ads engineering team, purpose-built to own that maturation end to end — working closely with product, enterprise solutions, and horizontal engineering teams across Serving, Measurement, Ads Quality, and Ads Manager.

We are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead this team of 10+ engineers. You'll drive platform stability and reliability, own partner onboarding and escalations, and lead forward-looking product development — evaluating the technical capabilities of competing platforms, identifying what to build next, and prototyping new capabilities. In close partnership with Product, Sales, and enterprise partners, you'll shape what Carrot Ads becomes and channel longer-term investments into the broader Ads engineering roadmap.

About the Job

• 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-stake