Director, Product - Platform

Overview

About the Role

Instacart is looking for a Director of Product to lead our Platform product organization. This team builds and evolves the foundational systems that power every Instacart transaction — including ordering, payments, offers and loyalty, identity and fraud, and customer support tooling.

In this role, you will set the long-term vision for our commerce and application platforms, lead a team of product managers, and partner closely with engineering and cross-functional leaders to ensure our core platforms are reliable, scalable, and easy to build on.

The Platform team owns the core services and APIs that other Instacart teams rely on to ship customer-facing experiences and enterprise solutions. This includes:

• Commerce Platform – orders, pricing and invoicing, payments and stored value, offers and loyalty.


• App Platform – account, identity and access, fraud and abuse protections, CX and support tooling.

The team’s mandate is to provide a stable, extensible foundation that lets Instacart launch new products quickly, safely, and with high quality.

• Set vision and strategy for Instacart’s core platforms, defining how they evolve over multiple years as the business and product portfolio grow.


• Own roadmaps and prioritization across multiple platform domains, balancing foundational reliability and scalability work with high-impact enablement for other product teams.


• Lead a team of PMs (including senior PMs and group PMs), providing coaching, clear expectations, and a strong bar for platform product craft.


• Drive cross-functional alignment with engineering, data science, operations, finance, and other product teams on major platform initiatives and tradeoffs.


• Establish and track clear success metrics for platform health and impact (e.g., reliability, performance, safety, and ease-of-use for internal customers).


• Champion modern, AI-enabled ways of working, both in how platform products are built (e.g., developer experience) and how they support intelligent, automated experiences over time.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of product management experience, including several years managing PMs (and ideally managing managers) in high-scale technology environments.


• Significant experience with platform, infrastructure, or commerce systems (e.g., payments, order management, identity/fraud, financial or transactional platforms).


• Strong technical fluency and comfort working through system design, tradeoffs, and constraints with senior engineering leaders.


• Proven track record of leading multi-quarter, cross-team platform initiatives and landing durable improvements in reliability, scalability, and developer productivity.


• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; comfortable simplifying complex topics for senior stakeholders and driving alignment across organizations.


• Demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain high-performing product managers and build healthy, high-trust teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in e-commerce, marketplaces, or enterprise platforms.


• Background working with enterprise customers or partners and translating their needs into platform capabilities.


• Experience applying AI/ML to either user-facing products or internal tools and workflows.


• Prior responsibility for products with high availability and correctness requirements.