Engineering Manager, Site Reliability

We're transforming the grocery industry At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers. Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table. Instacart is a Flex First team There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work. Overview Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by building technology that connects customers, shoppers, retailers, and brands through a reliable, convenient online marketplace. The Site Reliability Engineering team helps ensure that this experience remains resilient, scalable, and dependable as Instacart grows. We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead a team of Site Reliability Engineers responsible for the systems, tools, and practices that support the reliability of Instacart’s technology platform. In this role, you will manage and develop a team of engineers while partnering closely with engineering teams across the company to improve availability, scalability, performance, observability, and operational excellence. This is an opportunity to shape the future of reliability at significant scale. You will help establish sound engineering practices, guide complex technical initiatives, and create an environment where teams can build and operate dependable systems. The role is well suited for a collaborative, hands-on people leader who is energized by complex problems, thrives in a fast-changing environment, and is motivated by helping others do their best work. About the Job Lead, mentor, and develop a team of Site Reliability Engineers, establishing clear goals, providing actionable feedback, and supporting career growth and professional development. Set the team’s technical direction and priorities for improving the reliability, scalability, availability, performance, and operational readiness of Instacart’s systems. Partner with engineering, product, security, infrastructure, and other cross-functional teams to define reliability standards, influence system design, and deliver initiatives that improve the customer and developer experience. Drive incident management and operational excellence, including incident response, post-incident learning, service-level objectives, capacity planning, observability, and continuous risk reduction. Promote automation and self-service tooling that reduce operational toil, improve deployment confidence, and enable engineering teams to own and operate their services effectively. Balance near-term operational needs with long-term investments, making thoughtful tradeoffs in a high-growth environment where priorities and requirements can change quickly. Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders, bringing transparency to reliability risks, project status, tradeoffs, and decisions. This role requires comfort with ambiguity and a willingness to engage directly with challenging operational and organizational problems. You will be expected to make decisions with incomplete information, respond calmly during incidents, and help teams learn from failure without assigning blame. Success will require both strong people l