Director of Software Engineering, Order Experience

Overview

Instacart is seeking an experienced Director of Engineering to lead our Order Experience organization—Cart & Checkout, Order Status Page, Order Quality, Shopping Lists, and Family accounts. This organization powers the transaction engine behind our four-sided marketplace, directly impacting billions of dollars in GTV and millions of customers daily.

As Director of Order Experience, you will lead a 20-25 person engineering organization and own complex, mission-critical systems including checkout architecture, payments integration, order management, and post-order quality. This role demands exceptional cross-organizational dependency management: Order Experience is a critical dependency for nearly every major launch at Instacart. You'll manage high-volume intake from 10+ partner teams while maintaining system reliability, optimizing conversion, and building for the future. Success requires strategic prioritization, platform thinking, and the ability to rebuild foundations while shipping customer value.

About the Job

• 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.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 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 Qualifications

• 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