Senior Engineering Manager, Retailer Platform

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

Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team of ~12 engineers responsible for the architectural and integration work that allows Instacart's Retailer Platform to scale across the world's largest grocers. The role involves setting the unifying technical thesis for the team (multi-tenancy, data isolation, configuration-driven release management, and per-retailer extensibility) and driving consolidation of bespoke retailer-vertical services onto unified platform rails. The manager will partner with ML and Data Engineering on enterprise data platform compliance for ML systems and deliver self-service tooling for retailers.

What you'd actually do

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Deliver self-service tooling — including sandbox environments, configuration interfaces, and retailer-facing extensibility — that lets retailers and internal teams ship without engineering bottlenecks.

Skills

Required

  • software engineering experience
  • managing engineering teams
  • platform or infrastructure products
  • B2B or enterprise context
  • leading teams of 10+ engineers
  • hiring
  • performance management
  • career development
  • operating in ambiguous, high-growth environments
  • driving clarity and forward motion through ambiguity
  • cross-functional leadership
  • influencing outcomes across multiple engineering and product organizations
  • structured escalation
  • leading multi-team architectural transitions
  • consolidation
  • replatforming
  • multi-tenancy
  • data isolation
  • distributed systems
  • API/SDK design
  • cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS or GCP)
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience

Nice to have

  • commerce platforms
  • omnichannel retail
  • OMS
  • POS
  • catering systems
  • connected-store / in-store technology
  • building multi-tenant platforms
  • per-tenant configuration
  • per-tenant isolation
  • per-tenant extensibility
  • partnering with ML and Data Engineering teams
  • data platform compliance
  • model training infrastructure
  • data isolation initiatives
  • scaling enterprise integrations
  • managing partner-facing technical relationships
  • leading other engineering managers
  • growing two-layer organizations

What the JD emphasized

  • multi-tenancy
  • data isolation
  • per-retailer extensibility
  • ML and Data Engineering
  • enterprise data platform compliance
  • per-retailer model training