Staff Experience Design - Lifecycle and Growth

OVERVIEW

Every year, people across the world spend nearly one trillion dollars on groceries. It’s an industry that’s been around for centuries. Food itself, however, has been a constant in people’s lives since the beginning of time. Yes, sustenance is essential, but it’s also much more than that. Food can be a part of a daily ritual or a special moment that resonates with people on a meaningful and emotional level. It can be a much-needed break in a long day, a taste that brings back memories, a creative experiment, a shared meal with loved ones, or even comfort during a hard time. Whether it’s a special occasion or an everyday occurrence, it should always be easy for people to get the ingredients they need.

The Instacart Design Team is dedicated to making grocery shopping effortless for everyone and finding solutions to large-scale opportunities that will forever change the way people feed themselves and their loved ones. We’re a four sided marketplace and design for the needs of Consumer, Shoppers, Retailers, and Advertisers.

We’re hiring for a Staff Product Designer to join the Lifecycle & Growth team and lead experience design across Instacart’s subscription and growth ecosystem. You’ll shape how people first encounter, evaluate, commit to, and renew their relationship with Instacart—bringing strategic product thinking together with emotionally resonant, brand-forward design. This is a high-impact, highly collaborative role partnering closely with Product, Engineering, Marketing, Brand, Data Science, and Research to drive measurable business outcomes while strengthening customer trust and long-term loyalty. While this role is remote, the design lead for this pillar is located in NYC - which is one of our two in-person hubs.

About The Role

Daily Rhythms and Samples of Work:

• Drive and lead experience briefs with Lifecycle & Growth to design end-to-end experiences for new and returning customers: from initial onboarding and education through habit formation, personalization, and eventual graduation into IC+ subscription and broader program value.
• Lead end-to-end experience design briefs across the core grocery app, from first-time order through repeat use, including home, browse, cart, checkout, post-order, and key lifecycle moments that build attachment, trust, and routine.
• Define and own experience frameworks that map key journeys (first 3 orders, building repeat patterns, meal planning, nutrition and health goals, subscription adoption) and clearly articulate the beats, rhythms, and jobs to be done at each step.
• Codify experiential principles—functional and emotional—to guide what users should understand, decide, and feel across flows, and translate those principles into patterns, content hierarchies, and interaction rules that can scale across teams.
• Use AI-assisted prototyping and concept development as a core part of your practice—providing strong art direction, references, and experiential intent to generate flows and concepts that align with Instacart’s design system, brand positioning, and evolving interaction patterns.
• Shape content, hierarchy, and information architecture across surfaces: define how information is structured, named, and prioritized so that users have clear comprehension at every step while the business and partners get the right visibility where it matters.
• Design for visual clarity, pacing, and density—establishing patterns, grids, and rules that govern how modules, carousels, and key placements work (e.g., above vs. below the fold/break) to balance user needs, business objectives, and partner value.
• Work with Research (and sometimes lead or plan research yourself) to uncover insights about meals, nutrition, health goals, and lifecycle behaviors, then translate those insights into concrete journey maps, flows, and experiential principles.
• Craft narratives, naming, and value propositions for experiences and features—creating artifacts (strategy docs, flows, storyboards, internal decks) that help teams socialize ideas internally and, when needed, inform external positioning for customers.
• Raise the bar for experience-led thinking across the pod(s)—mentoring partners on how to think in journeys and emotions, not just screens, and advocating for cohesive, principle-driven experiences that feel uniquely Instacart.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience designing consumer-facing digital products and experiences across web and mobile, with a portfolio that highlights complex, multi-step journeys and end-to-end flows including marketing channels like social, crm, and campaigns.
• Driven by continuity, consistency, cohesion, comprehension and brand differentiation with an exceptional eye towards design system detail.
• Strong track record of projects that demonstrate a fluency and depth in at least two design languages :  content design, UX/product design, visual design, design strategy, design research —and demonstrable fluency collaborating across the others.
• Proven ability to partner with product and business leaders as you direct multiple design disciplines through clear briefs, concept iteration, testing, executive reviews and feature launches.
• An overwhelming fascination with human behaviors, pop, food, social and shopping culture, communication, visualization, design systems, language, content hierarchy, and the evolving models of producing world class design products for our future conditions. 
• Exceptional communications skills with clear strengths in structured strategic storytelling, context setting, visually compelling and polished  presentations that inspire, and clear decisions making frameworks/concepts that accelerate agreements to move forward. 
• Case studies of brand-centric product design work that is driven by user insights, data science, strategic frameworks, and metrics of impact to the business.
• Track record of navigating ambiguity and multi-stakeholder environments, creating structure from loosely defined opportunity areas and guiding teams toward alignment.
• Fluency in google slides and figma is a must with desire for additional design or generative tools including but not limited to: Claude Code, Loveable, Cursor, and ChatGPT.
  
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing for marketplaces, e-commerce, grocery, CPG, or membership/subscription products, especially where lifecycle, growth, or repeat behavior is critical.
• Experience shaping onboarding, activation, and retention journeys, including first-order and early repeat experiences that build habits, loyalty, and personalization over time.
• Familiarity with domains like meal planning, nutrition, health goals, and allergy/restriction management, personalization and how they intersect with household grocery behavior.
• Experience designing high-visibility surfaces such as home, personalized feeds, and merchandising placements—including how to manage density, stacking, carousels, and above-the-fold/break strategies for maximum clarity and impact.
• Experience working within and evolving large-scale design systems, ensuring AI- and human-produced flows align to system constraints while allowing room for innovation.
• Comfort working with distributed, cross-functional teams across time zones, and influencing outcomes on multi-team initiatives without direct authority.

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