Engineering Manager, Site Reliability

About This RoleAI processing…

Key Responsibilities

• 1
  Lead, mentor, and develop a team of Site Reliability Engineers, establishing clear goals, providing actionable feedback, and supporting career growth and professional development.
• 2
  Set the team’s technical direction and priorities for improving the reliability, scalability, availability, performance, and operational readiness of Instacart’s systems.
• 3
  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.
• 4
  Drive incident management and operational excellence, including incident response, post-incident learning, service-level objectives, capacity planning, observability, and continuous risk reduction.
• 5
  Promote automation and self-service tooling that reduce operational toil, improve deployment confidence, and enable engineering teams to own and operate their services effectively.
• 6
  Balance near-term operational needs with long-term investments, making thoughtful tradeoffs in a high-growth environment where priorities and requirements can change quickly.
• 7
  Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders, bringing transparency to reliability risks, project status, tradeoffs, and decisions.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Seven or more years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, or a related field.
• 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 or participating in production incident response, post-incident reviews, reliability improvement initiatives, and operational readiness practices.
• Experience communicating technical risks, priorities, and tradeoffs to engineering leaders and cross-functional stakeholders.
• 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.

Perks & Benefits