Engineering Manager (Site Reliability)

Join Instacart as an Engineering Manager (Site Reliability) and lead a team of Site Reliability Engineers responsible for the reliability of our technology platform. In this role, you will manage and develop a team of engineers, set the technical direction and priorities for improving reliability, and partner with cross-functional teams to define reliability standards. You will also drive incident management and operational excellence, promote automation and self-service tooling, and communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders. This role requires strong people leadership and technical depth, as well as experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering.

- 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
- 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 leadership and enough technical depth to ask the right questions, evaluate tradeoffs, and guide effective solutions
- Seven or more years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, or a related field
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
- Experience communicating technical risks, priorities, and tradeoffs to engineering leaders and cross-functional stakeholders
- Experience leading or participating in production incident response, post-incident reviews, reliability improvement initiatives, and operational readiness practices
- Two or more years of experience managing, mentoring, or leading engineering teams
- Professional experience with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, networking, containers, orchestration platforms, or related production technologies
- Experience leading Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, or developer productivity teams
- Experience operating highly available services at significant scale and improving service-level objectives, observability, capacity, or disaster recovery capabilities
- Experience with infrastructure as code, continuous delivery, monitoring, logging, tracing, and automated remediation
- Experience building or evolving reliability programs across multiple engineering teams, including shared standards, operational reviews, and service ownership practices
- Demonstrated ability to create alignment across teams, navigate ambiguity, and turn complex technical challenges into clear, achievable plans
- A leadership approach grounded in empathy, transparency, direct communication, collaboration, and a commitment to inclusive team development