Senior Engineering Manager, Software — Carrot Ads Platform

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).