Senior Engineering Manager, Software — Carrot Ads Platform

United StatesRemoteFull TimeManager / Head$265,000–$279,500 /yrPosted 2 months agoVisa sponsorship available

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Role summary

Carrot Ads, Instacart's publisher advertising platform, is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team of 10+ engineers. This role is critical for maturing the platform to meet enterprise retailer expectations. The manager will drive platform stability, reliability, and scalability, oversee partner onboarding and escalations, and lead forward-looking product development. Key responsibilities include shaping strategy and roadmap through customer feedback and market insights, fostering a culture of ownership, and elevating engineering excellence via robust testing and CI/CD practices. The ideal candidate has 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years managing engineering teams in a B2B or enterprise SaaS environment, with direct domain experience in ad tech or retail media.

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-stakes stakeholders.

Shape strategy and roadmap by synthesizing customer feedback, market and competitive insights, and internal priorities; translate long-term bets into executable plans across Serving, Measurement, Quality, and Ads Manager teams.

Elevate engineering excellence with robust testing, CI/CD, performance optimization, and data-driven decision-making; deliver measurable business impact on a predictable cadence in a fast-moving environment.

Invest in self-service platform capabilities and tooling that reduce operational burden, improve partner autonomy, and unlock efficient scale.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

8+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years managing engineering teams delivering platform or infrastructure products in a B2B or enterprise SaaS environment.

Experience leading teams of 8+ engineers, including hiring, performance management, and career development.

Demonstrated success operating in ambiguous, high-growth settings while balancing reactive partner needs with long-term platform investments.

Proven cross-functional leadership driving outcomes across multiple engineering teams and stakeholders to deliver complex, multi-quarter roadmaps.

Direct domain experience in ad tech, retail media, or publisher-facing platforms.

Technical proficiency with distributed systems and cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS or GCP), along with data and ads-adjacent technologies (e.g., event streaming, experimentation, measurement).

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience scaling enterprise integrations and managing partner-facing technical relationships and SLAs.

Track record of building self-service platform capabilities and tooling that significantly reduce manual operations.

Comfort applying market and competitive analysis to inform engineering strategy and investment decisions.

Background with advertising serving, measurement/attribution, or campaign management systems.

Experience establishing reliability practices at scale (e.g., SLO frameworks, incident management, on-call health, post-incident learning loops).

#LI-Remote

Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here.

Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here. For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.

CA, NY, CT, NJ

$265,000—$279,500 USD

$254,000—$268,000 USD

OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI

$243,000—$256,500 USD

All other states

$221,000—$233,000 USD

Sample Instacart interview questions

1
Design a system for real-time sentiment analysis of social media posts.
system designmedium
2
How would you design a global search for products (frontend)?
system designdifficult
3
Develop a secure distributed system for secrets storage and access.
system designmedium
4
Develop a distributed data versioning management system.
system designmedium
5
Design a distributed caching layer for high performance.
system designmedium

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