Senior Software Engineering Manager, Ads Solutions

Overview

Instacart Ads Solutions Engineering is the leading charge for the Instacart Ads business; we ship innovative, cutting edge consumer ad experiences that customers see across our marketplace, forming the core value we deliver to advertisers and a key growth engine for Instacart’s multi-billion-dollar business.

As the Senior Software Engineering Manager, Ads Solutions, you will lead the engineering organization responsible for our Sponsored Products, Display Ads, Promotions/Discounts, and emerging Caper Ads experiences. You will guide the strategy and execution for consumer-facing ad formats and the product infrastructure behind them, including the ground-truth eventing stack that powers billing, optimization, and measurement.

This is a high-impact, highly cross-functional role. You will partner closely with Product Management, Data Science, Machine Learning, Ads Serving and Measurement, Ads Manager, Consumer Product, and Ads Sales to ship compelling ad experiences that drive consumer engagement and advertiser value. You will lead and develop an org of 20+ engineers, including one engineering manager, across backend / mobile / web, and help shape the culture, processes, and technical bar of the group.

About the Job

• Own the vision and multi-quarter roadmap for Ads Solutions engineering across Sponsored Products, Display Ads, Promotions/Discounts, and Caper Ads, balancing consumer trust, advertiser ROI, and revenue growth.
• Lead, mentor, and scale an organization of 20+ engineers (including one manager); drive recruiting, career development, performance management, and an inclusive, high-ownership culture.
• Raise the technical bar across backend services, mobile and web clients, and the ground-truth eventing/measurement stack; ensure reliability, low latency, privacy, and data quality for ads experiences.
• Drive end-to-end execution in partnership with Ads Serving, ML, Measurement, Ads Manager, and Consumer teams; align on APIs, contracts, experimentation, and success metrics to ship at pace.
• Establish operational excellence with clear OKRs, program planning, on-call quality, incident reviews, and continuous improvement to deliver predictably in a fast-moving environment.
• Partner with Product and Ads Sales on customer development, launch readiness, adoption, and performance; iterate rapidly using experiment results and customer feedback to improve engagement, conversion, and revenue.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 4+ years managing engineers, with a track record leading teams of 15+ and delivering complex consumer-facing products.
• Experience building and operating large-scale consumer or marketplace systems across distributed backend services and at least one client platform (iOS, Android, or web).
• Demonstrated ability to define multi-quarter roadmaps and OKRs and deliver measurable outcomes (e.g., improvements to engagement, conversion, or revenue).
• Experience owning product instrumentation/eventing and experimentation or measurement frameworks used for monetization, optimization, or billing accuracy.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience with Ads Solutions/Formats such as Sponsored Products, Display, and Promotions, and familiarity with ad serving, ranking, pacing, or optimization systems.
• Knowledge of the ads ecosystem, including auction dynamics, budget and flight management, attribution/measurement, and brand safety.
• Prior leadership of organizations of 20+ engineers across multiple teams in a high-growth, cross-functional environment.
• Technical depth with Ruby on Rails, Swift, Kotlin and/or React.
• Experience partnering with enterprise or retail sales and go-to-market teams to drive product adoption and performance.

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