Instacart · 9 hours ago
Director of Software Engineering, Order Experience
United States
Full-time
Remote
Director/Executive
$304K/yr - $321K/yr
12+ years expInstacart is transforming the grocery industry and is seeking an experienced Director of Engineering to lead their Order Experience organization. This role involves managing a team of engineers and overseeing mission-critical systems that impact customer transactions and operational excellence.
Food and BeverageE-CommerceLogisticsDelivery ServiceGroceryShopping
Responsibilities
Manage high-volume intake from 10+ partner organizations (Ads, Growth, Partnerships, Fulfillment, Platform, Home) who depend on Order Experience for critical launches; balance competing priorities, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and establish intake governance processes for request triage, effort estimation, and delivery commitments
Own the vision and multi-quarter roadmap for Order Experience, balancing customer trust, operational excellence, conversion optimization, and technical foundation investments; drive architectural decisions for foundational systems and champion approaches that reduce implementation complexity across platforms
Lead, mentor, and scale an organization of ~30 engineers across Cart & Checkout, Order Status Page, Order Quality, and Shopping Lists; hire an Engineering Manager and Senior II Engineers (L6), build out your leadership team, and grow existing engineers through mentorship and stretch projects
Raise the technical bar across backend services (Ruby, Python), mobile (iOS, Android), web, and full-stack systems; ensure reliability, scalability, security, and performance for high-volume, revenue-critical systems that process millions of orders
Establish operational excellence with clear OKRs, predictable delivery, strong on-call practices, incident response, and post-mortems; champion technical investments in checkout architecture modernization, system observability, and reducing technical debt
Own key business metrics including checkout conversion, cart abandonment, order completion rate, order quality, and customer satisfaction; drive experiments and data-driven decision-making to optimize for GTV, customer retention, and operational cost
Partner closely with the Commerce Platform team to build shared expertise in payments, orders, and pricing systems; drive end-to-end execution in partnership with Product, Design, Data Science, Operations, and peer engineering leaders across Shopping, Ads, Growth, and Platform
Qualification
Required
Expert cross-organizational dependency management and intake prioritization in high-velocity environments where your systems are critical dependencies for multiple teams (this is the #1 requirement)
12+ years of professional software engineering experience with 5+ years managing engineers, including at least 2+ years leading managers or organizations of 20+ engineers
Proven experience managing platform teams that enable other engineering organizations; demonstrated ability to balance partner requests with technical health and core roadmap
Track record evolving legacy systems toward extensibility and self-service to reduce bottlenecks and enable team independence
Deep understanding of distributed systems and high-availability, high-throughput systems (payments, transactions, order management)
Strong ability to recruit, hire, and develop senior engineering talent (L5-L6) and Engineering Managers; build organizational bench strength and develop ICs into leaders
Demonstrated ability to influence and align stakeholders across Product, Design, Data Science, and Operations
Preferred
Experience with e-commerce, payments, checkout, or transaction systems
Track record building or rebuilding engineering teams through transitions
Experience hiring and developing Engineering Managers
Background in mobile and web development (iOS, Android, React, GraphQL)
Experience leading re-architecture efforts that reduce platform fragmentation and enable faster iteration cycles
Experience with modern checkout paradigms including conversational interfaces, AI-assisted flows, or approaches that simplify cross-platform development
Familiarity with experimentation platforms and A/B testing at scale
Experience with Golang, Ruby on Rails, Python, or similar backend frameworks
Benefits
Eligible for a new hire equity grant
Annual refresh grants
Company
Instacart
Instacart is an online grocery platform that offers same-day delivery and pickup services for retailers and consumers.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Instacart has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (156)
2024 (173)
2023 (111)
2022 (159)
2021 (170)
2020 (59)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$2.92BKey Investors
Andreessen Horowitz,D1 Capital Partners,Fidelity,Sequoia Capital,T. Rowe PriceD1 Capital Partners,Valiant Peregrine FundT. Rowe Price
2023-09-19IPO
2021-11-01Private Equity· $232M
2021-09-05Secondary Market
Leadership Team
Chris Rogers
Chief Executive Officer
Brandon Leonardo
Co-Founder
Recent News
The Motley Fool
2026-02-06
2026-02-05
Digital Commerce 360
2026-02-04
Company data provided by crunchbase