Senior Program Manager, Commercial at Instacart

We're transforming the grocery industry 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. Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table. Instacart is a Flex First team There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work. Overview We're seeking an experienced Senior Program Manager, Commercial to provide holistic oversight and stewardship of our in-house creative agency’s ecosystem of resources: people, time, and budget. You'll serve as air traffic control for a portion of our creative portfolio, ensuring what we've sized, scoped, and allocated stays to plan, and reacting quickly with solutions when we need to deviate. When our most complex, cross-functional programs require dedicated leadership, you'll step in to provide hands-on program management, ensuring seamless execution across multiple work streams and stakeholders. This role uniquely blends portfolio management (your primary focus) with strategic program management for high-stakes initiatives. You'll know when to zoom out to manage the ecosystem and when to zoom in to drive critical programs to successful completion. You'll apply broad expertise to lead and contribute to functional objectives that achieve company goals in innovative ways, working closely with the Head of Creative Operations, Executive Creative Director, and Head of Production. About the Job • Provide holistic oversight of a portion of Local Produce's creative portfolio, managing the interconnected ecosystem of people, time, and budget across your assigned campaigns and initiatives—serving as 'air traffic control' to ensure optimal resource allocation and utilization • Monitor portfolio health and react quickly with solutions when projects deviate from plan, reallocating resources and adjusting scope to keep work on track while protecting team focus and preventing burnout • Lead end-to-end program management for the most complex, high-priority initiatives within your portfolio that span multiple creative disciplines, have cross-functional dependencies, involve external vendors, or are business-critical with high visibility • Develop comprehensive program plans with clear workstreams, milestones, and dependencies; coordinate across teams while managing risks, issues, and changes; and drive regular program reviews to ensure successful delivery • Provide portfolio-level and program-specific reporting that gives leadership clear visibility into creative capacity, utilization, and expenses; forecast future resource needs and evaluate tradeoffs between in-house talent, agency support, and contractors • Design and maintain portfolio management systems, dashboards, and reporting tools that enable real-time visibility into resource allocation, capacity, project status, and program health • Establish frameworks for intake, prioritization, and resource allocation that ensure your portfolio stays aligned with business goals, and determine when initiatives require dedicated program management vs. portfolio-level oversight • Partner with the Head of Creative Operations on capacity planning for Local Produce, owning capacity planning for your portfolio while maintaining a clear view of available bandwidth across all creative disciplines and proactively flagging capacity risks with recommended solutions • Translate company goals into operational objectives for your portfolio and build supportive relationships with stakeholders across Marketing, Creative, Production, and Finance • Partner with leadership to foster a positive, collaborative culture within Local Produce and encourage experimentation with new ways of working, including AI tools and emerging technologies About You Minimum Qualifications • 8-10 years of experience in Creative Operations, Production Management, or Studio Operations, with demonstrated expertise in both portfolio management and complex program management • Proven track record providing portfolio-level oversight in fast-paced creative environments—managing the ecosystem of people, time, and budget rather than individual project execution • Deep experience leading complex programs involving multiple creative disciplines, cross-functional teams, and external partners- with a focus on brand, product, and consumer • The ability to function in a highly • Strong background in capacity planning, resource forecasting, and portfolio optimization • Experience serving as 'air traffic control' for creative teams while also 'piloting' the most critical initiatives • Strong understanding of creative disciplines and how to coordinate them in complex programs • Ability to thrive in an extremely fast-paced environment, proactively identifying and implementing solutions while consistently demonstrating a high bar of excellence and polish in all deliverables • Deep hands-on experience with program management tools (e.g., Workfront, Asana, Monday.com, etc.) Preferred Qualifications • At least 3-5 years in an agency environment (advertising agency, creative agency, or production company), with experience managing both creative capacity across portfolios and leading complex, multi-work stream programs • Strong analytical skills with ability to model scenarios, forecast capacity needs, identify risks, and evaluate complex tradeoffs between speed, quality, and cost across functions • Systems thinking—ability to design portfolio management frameworks that provide visibility and enable informed decision-making capability to process petabyte-scale data and deliver reports essential for billing, strategic decision-making, and partner management. Our products are used by millions of people every year. To meet–and exceed–expectations we are rapidly improving and modernizing our ads platform, helping raise the quality bar for our products across the entire organization. Sound exciting? Keep reading. The Ads Solutions Team is a vibrant collective of engineers pioneering new advertising formats at Instacart. Tasked with incubating and scaling cutting-edge ad solutions, our team fuels revenue growth and sustains vital partnerships within the Instacart Retail Media Network. As a beacon of innovation, our suite of display advertising offerings empowers brands to engage and educate consumers. About the Job As a Senior Engineer, you'll be integral to a full-stack team driving end-to-end development from client to backend. Known for agility, our team values rapid iteration alongside quality and craft: • Lead the design and implementation of new ad formats. • Collaborate across teams and across functions to set product requirements and long-term strategies. • Uphold and elevate technical standards, ensuring superior code quality, test coverage, and system performance. • Embrace cross-functional roles and tackle challenges beyond just code to amplify product outcomes. About You Minimum Qualifications • Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent proven industry experience (4+ years). • 5+ years of experience in software engineering. • Comprehensive understanding of distributed systems, proven experience with data processing technologies such as DBT and Airflow and common web frameworks such as Rails. • Highly proficient with SQL, capable of writing and reviewing complex queries for data analysis and debugging. • You can design for scale with the entire system in mind. • Solid communicator, comfortable seeking and receiving feedback. • Strong analytical and debugging skills. • Strong sense of ownership working with a large codebase and diverse suite of products. • A collaborative mindset to be able to partner with engineers, designers and PM's from multiple teams to co-create impactful solutions while supporting system contributions. • Strong organizational skills with the ability to communicate and present ideas clearly and influence key stakeholders at the manager, director, and VP level. Preferred Qualifications • Prior work experience in the digital advertising industry. • Experience with big data technologies such as Spark, Hadoop, Flink, Hive or Kafka, and with both streaming and batching data pipelines. • Proven experience with distributed system design. • Strong general programming and algorithm skills. • Strong attention to detail and accuracy in the implementation, keen eye for edge cases and code reviews. • Data driven mindset. #LI-Remote Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here. Currently, we are only hiring in the following provinces: Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here. For Canadian based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below. CAN$145,000—$153,000 CAD