Overview

Instacart's Fraud, Appeasement & Identity team protects the marketplace and everyone who depends on it: customers, shoppers, retailers, and brand partners. Within this team, the Identity Platform group builds and operates the core services that verify who our users are, secure their accounts, and provide trustworthy identity and eligibility signals to systems across Instacart.

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Identity and Risk Platform team. In this role, you'll own a critical part of Instacart's trust infrastructure across authentication, account lifecycle, identity verification, and graph and relationship modeling, while managing and developing a team of backend and platform engineers. Your work will directly influence fraud losses, account security, marketplace integrity, and Instacart's ability to scale responsibly while meeting evolving regulatory and privacy expectations.

This is a highly cross-functional, fast-moving role for a leader who enjoys building reliable platform systems, coaching strong engineering teams, and solving adversarial problems at scale. You'll partner closely with Product, Security, Fraud, Data Science, Legal, Operations, and external vendors to help shape the future of identity and risk at Instacart.

About the Job

• Own the vision, roadmap, and execution for Identity and Fraud & Risk platforms — spanning authentication, account lifecycle, identity verification and eligibility, identity graph signals, and fraud detection and prevention - in close partnership with Product, Security, and Fraud leadership.
• Manage and develop a team of software engineers by setting clear goals, providing coaching and feedback, supporting career growth, and building an inclusive team culture grounded in accountability and high standards.
• Ensure the team delivers reliable, high-quality systems by defining service health goals, improving on-call practices, leading post-incident learning, and driving long-term remediation for critical platform services.
• Partner with Product, Data Science and Machine Learning, Security, Fraud Operations, Legal, and external identity vendors to design and ship business-critical initiatives such as account takeover prevention, stronger identity verification, eligibility workflows, and compliance-related capabilities.
• Collaborate with senior individual contributors to define technical direction for how Instacart models identity, exposes identity and risk signals, and evolves toward more unified risk scoring and fraud-as-a-service patterns.
• Lead AI-forward development practices for the team, including thoughtful use of AI agents in design, coding, testing, and operations, with appropriate guardrails for safety, privacy, and compliance.
• Define and evolve the technical strategy for how identity and risk signals are surfaced, contracted, and consumed across agents, AI systems, and internal platforms - balancing safety, reliability, and developer experience at scale.
• Balance roadmap delivery with operational excellence by managing technical debt, reliability and security work, and a high-volume defect backlog while making disciplined tradeoffs in a rapidly changing environment.
• Represent Identity Platform in cross-functional planning and leadership forums, clearly communicating priorities, risks, technical tradeoffs, and business impact to stakeholders across Engineering and Trust & Safety.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years in an engineering leadership, engineering management, or technical lead role.
• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems or real-time decisioning platforms in production, such as identity, fraud, risk, payments, or other safety-critical domains.
• Strong technical background in backend or platform engineering, with experience in languages such as Go, Java, or Python.
• Hands-on familiarity with cloud infrastructure such as AWS or GCP and modern datastores such as Postgres, DynamoDB, Redis, or similar technologies.
• Experience managing or leading engineers through hiring, performance management, feedback, coaching, and career development.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional partners such as Product, Security, Data Science or Machine Learning, Operations, Legal, or Compliance to define requirements, make tradeoffs, and deliver measurable business impact.
• Experience working in an AI-forward engineering environment, such as AI-assisted development, agentic workflows, or LLM-powered services, with the ability to define appropriate boundaries between human and automated decision-making.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to translate technical details into business impact, operational risk, and clear recommendations for senior stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience with trust and safety, identity verification, fraud, risk, or payments systems in a high-scale marketplace or consumer platform.
• Experience designing systems that handle sensitive identity, account, or payments data with strong privacy, security, auditability, and compliance requirements.
• Experience integrating external identity, risk, or verification vendors, such as device fingerprinting services, or document verification platforms.
• Experience defining vendor SLAs, managing vendor performance, or executing migrations and vendor swaps for business-critical systems.
• Familiarity with experimentation and analytics tooling used to measure impact on fraud, account security, false-positive rates, customer friction, or operational efficiency.
• Experience applying AI or LLM-based approaches to engineering, detection, identity graph signals, unified risk scoring, or fraud and identity decisioning workflows.

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