Senior Technical Program Manager, Ads

Overview

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.

This role offers the exciting opportunity to leverage your technical expertise and leadership skills to drive programs in the Ads & Data Organization that enhance our products, applications, platforms, and ultimately, the experiences of millions of customers, shoppers, and partners. As a Senior Technical Program Manager at Instacart focussing on Ads, you will be at the forefront of our mission to transform the grocery industry by delivering on Instacart's most complex and impactful efforts. You will fully own programs, working closely with cross-functional teams in Engineering, Product Management, Data Science, Design, Business Development and others to define requirements, manage execution, mitigate risks, and deliver on time with high quality outcomes. We are looking for driven individuals who have direct experience working on Ads, ability to thrive in a fast-paced engineering environment, are passionate about quality and improving team performance, and feel comfortable making decisions on scope and technical trade-offs as well as building executive-level narratives. You are able to operate independently and work proactively with various teams across the organization.

The Technical Program Management team is an integral part of the Instacart Engineering organization. We bring teams together to tackle big problems and lead Instacart's products, platform, and operational excellence forward. Our work and its impact span the multi-sided marketplace, from connecting customers with coupons and deals for their favorite brands, unlocking new ways to shop for and deliver groceries, to evolving our ML/AI and data infrastructure at Instacart and capitalizing on the Gen AI innovations, and more. We are trusted to deliver on Instacart's strategy at scale, unravel dependencies, and promote the strong collaboration and communication that enables teams across the company to achieve more together.

About the Job

• Lead the planning and high quality technical execution of large sized engineering programs in the Ads domain with high degree of ambiguity, complexity, and visibility demonstrating a strong sense of urgency, efficiency, and ownership.
• Work closely with Software Engineers, Product Managers, Product Designers, Data Scientists and other cross-functional partners to set project objectives and metric-based success criteria. Drive definition of project requirements and execution plans, and manage an overall program's progress and outcome.
• Own clear and effective communication with stakeholders, ensuring alignment on and awareness of priorities, risks, and changes.
• Foster a culture of teamwork and shared goals, creating a collaborative team environment and driving the right level of process to ensure efficiency and high quality delivery within the program team.
• Contribute broadly to Instacart's success by suggesting and driving organization-wide initiatives.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of work experience post-graduation in a technology field, preferably as a technical program or project manager, product manager, software engineer (technical domain), or related technical discipline.
• Demonstrated ability to create functional specs, set program structure and influence program strategy. Previous experience in managing complex multi-org programs end-to-end, from definition to launch, throughout a software development lifecycle.
• A strong communicator with the ability to distill multiple streams of information, convey priorities and risks, and build a narrative for stakeholders.
• A strong sense of ownership and intellectual curiosity to understand executional and technical problems in depth, identify potential issues and offer actions to prevent them.
• Excellent collaborator and motivator, able to bring a team together to align and deliver on a common goal. Can build trust and partnerships with senior Engineering and Product leaders.
• Growth mindset - seeks and is receptive to actionable feedback and growth opportunities.
• Takes accountability seriously; can operate independently to deliver responsibilities and milestones on time and within budget.
• Self-motivated and thrives in a fast-paced environment.
• Bachelor's degree in a technology / engineering discipline.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in a technology/engineering discipline.
•  Direct experience working on Ads Technology and experiences is a big plus.
•  Demonstrated ability to showcase deep technical domain knowledge on the programs that you take on, enabling you to be seen as a strong technical voice in the program and adding significant value towards architecting a program.
• Demonstrated ability to drive architectural and strategic decisions at the org leadership level.
• Extensive previous experience around creating innovative program management processes/tools/approaches to deliver company outcomes reliably and efficiently.

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