Engineering Manager, Enterprise Platform

Instacart Instacart · Consumer · United States · Remote · Leadership (Engineering)

Engineering Manager for Instacart's Enterprise Platform team, focusing on core APIs and tools for retailers. The role involves owning technical strategy, leading a team of 10+ engineers, designing and delivering high-scale, low-latency distributed services, and ensuring operational excellence. The team supports $4B in GTV and is growing rapidly. The role emphasizes improving developer velocity and product quality, including the pragmatic use of AI to automate tasks.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own and articulate the technical strategy and multi‑quarter roadmap for Enterprise Platform APIs, tools, and data models, aligning outcomes with enterprise objectives and retailer needs.
  2. Lead, mentor, and grow a high‑performing team of 10+ software engineers; hire exceptional talent, provide coaching and feedback, and foster an inclusive, high‑trust, high‑ownership culture.
  3. Design and deliver high‑scale, low‑latency APIs and distributed services (REST/gRPC); define clear API contracts, versioning policies, and robust schema management.
  4. Partner cross‑functionally with Product, Business Development, Professional Services, Data Science, and peer engineering teams to prioritize impact, land cross‑org initiatives, and drive platform adoption across stakeholders.
  5. Oversee production services end‑to‑end; establish engineering best practices and SLOs/SLAs, guide on‑call operations, lead incident response and postmortems, and raise the bar on reliability and operational excellence.

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
  • 2+ years managing teams of 10+ software engineers
  • Proven track record leading backend/platform teams that build and operate high‑scale, low‑latency APIs and distributed services
  • Hands‑on experience with service‑oriented architectures, API design (REST and/or gRPC), data modeling, and schema/version management
  • Proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Go, Java, or Python)
  • Experience building services on a major cloud provider (e.g., AWS or GCP)
  • Experience running always‑on services: defining SLOs/SLAs, participating in on‑call rotations, leading incident response, and driving postmortem improvements
  • Demonstrated ability to define and deliver a technical roadmap, align stakeholders, and ship cross‑functional projects end‑to‑end
  • Experience hiring, coaching, and performance managing engineers
  • Commitment to building an inclusive, collaborative team environment
  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Nice to have

  • Expertise with observability and reliability tooling, plus resiliency/chaos testing
  • Success driving platform adoption across multiple stakeholder teams, balancing long‑term platform investments with near‑term product needs
  • Domain experience in e‑commerce, marketplaces, or enterprise platforms
  • Experience improving developer velocity using AI technologies
  • Advanced degree in a relevant field

What the JD emphasized

  • high-scale, low-latency APIs and distributed services
  • enterprise-grade experience at scale
  • operational excellence
  • developer velocity and product quality through great tooling, CI/CD, observability, and pragmatic use of AI to automate toil and accelerate delivery