This role provides technical leadership for a marketing technology team, focusing on building and enhancing systems, APIs, and data pipelines for paid marketing channels. The engineer will drive the technical roadmap, make architectural decisions for scalability, and improve team productivity through process and tooling enhancements. Responsibilities include leading cross-team initiatives, partnering with product and marketing leaders, and mentoring other engineers.
Overview
The Marketing Enablement & Technology (MET) team sits within Instacart's Marketing organization, building the systems, APIs, and data pipelines powering Instacart's Paid Marketing channels—one of our most substantial growth levers. Operating at the intersection of Marketing, Product, and Engineering, we own the platforms behind campaign feeds, audience targeting, event pipelines, and QA automation.
We're seeking a Senior Software Engineer to provide technical leadership for the Paid MarTech pod—driving the team's technical roadmap, making key architectural decisions for reusability and scalability, and enhancing team productivity through process evolution and tooling improvements. You'll lead cross-team initiatives, partner directly with senior Product and Marketing leaders on strategic decisions, and serve as a domain expert for marketing technology across the organization.
About the Job
- Drive the team's technical roadmap and architectural decisions, balancing short and long-term investments to build reusable, scalable systems that serve current and future marketing needs.
- Enhance developer productivity by evolving processes, tools, and abstractions that improve team efficiency, system extensibility, and code quality across the codebase.
- Lead team-wide initiatives and propose strategic work on behalf of engineering management, partnering directly with senior Product and Marketing leaders on product design and technical decisions.
- Champion advanced observability, resilience (including chaos engineering and disaster recovery), cost optimization, and security-by-design principles across all team projects.
- Mentor engineers up to L5, act as a force multiplier through well-documented processes, and proactively resolve conflicts that block execution across teams.
About You
Minimum Qualifications
- 8–12 years of software engineering experience with demonstrated expertise leading technical roadmaps and making architectural decisions that impact team-level systems.
- Expert-level proficiency in Python with proven ability to design and implement reusable abstractions, frameworks, and patterns adopted across multiple projects.
- Deep technical knowledge of building scalable, high-throughput systems with comprehensive observability, cost efficiency, and security considerations.
- Demonstrated ability to partner with senior Product and Marketing leaders, significantly influencing product roadmap through identification of strategic technical opportunities.
- Proven track record of enhancing team productivity through process improvements, tooling development, and mentorship of senior engineers.
- Excellent communication and influence skills with ability to drive execution of cross-team and cross-functional initiatives while navigating organizational context and dependencies.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience defining and establishing infrastructure, tooling, and best practices for AI-assisted development across engineering teams.
- Deep expertise in ad tech platforms and marketing technology ecosystems, recognized as a domain expert within the organization.
- Track record of leading large-scale legacy system modernization efforts and strategically managing technical debt at team level.
- Experience establishing coding standards, architectural patterns, and technical review processes that elevate team quality.
- Demonstrated ability to proactively contribute during crises outside core technical expertise, serving as technical consultant for sub-pillar level initiatives.
- Experience collaborating with external teams on cross-pillar partnerships and acting as point of contact for technical collaboration.
#LI-Remote
Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here.
Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.
For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.
CA, NY, CT, NJ
$230,000—$242,500 USD
WA
$220,000—$232,000 USD
OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI
$211,000—$222,500 USD
All other states
$192,000—$202,500 USD
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