Director of Engineering, Software (Caper)

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

About the Role 

As the Head of Software for Caper, you own the software systems for Caper carts end-to-end. The scope ranges from mobile, frontend, backend, infra, and IoT and all AI integration points. You support a talented group of engineers and engineering leaders across software and QA. You are responsible for the vision, execution, and deployment of all software. Instacart’s goal has always been to support grocers and give retailers of all sizes an edge in an increasingly competitive industry while creating a seamless experience for customers and shoppers. With Caper.ai, we bring together online and offline shopping to create an entirely new in-store shopping experience for both customers and Instacart shoppers alike.

To be successful in this role, you should have extensive experience running software engineering teams, be technically deep, solve problems resourcefully and creatively, and adapt your process and styles to the changing needs of our evolution from small to enterprise-grade. 

 

About the Team

Caper.ai is a subsidiary of Instacart and an AI company. It leverages cutting-edge AI and computer vision technology to bring an autonomous shopping experience to the store. 

Its product, the Caper Cart - an AI-powered smart cart equipped with scales, sensors, touchscreens, and computer vision technology, is the cornerstone of the Instacart Platform Connected Stores initiative.  

Caper builds smart shopping carts powered by deep learning and computer vision to enable a seamless grab-and-go retail experience. Caper’s unique technology is a plug-and-play solution that does not require retail store renovation, operational overhaul, heavy computing, and endless image labeling & training. Retailers purchase intelligent shopping carts, and the entire store is upgraded with cashier-less capabilities!

Caper is one of the fastest-growing retail automation technology products in the market, costs less than 1% of our competition’s infrastructure, and is already widely adopted in the marketplace. Our cross-functional and durable Product team solves hard customer & business problems in ways our customers love.

 

About the Job

You will:

• Act as the Head of Software Engineering in a fast-paced, hyper-growth startup company. 
• Support overall company vision and drive business results.  
• Drive all software development, QA, and deployment end-to-end across mobile, frontend, backend, infra (including the nuanced areas such as CI/CD, data engineering, and demo infrastructure), and IoT. 
• Deeply involved in hardware (the shopping cart) and computer vision/AI development 
• Hire and develop the best talents in the organization and evolve them towards the rapid growth of the business. 
• Define and carry out the technical and product vision and tie them back into the company vision.
• Collaborate across departments to deliver results: product, design, enterprise solutions, logistics and operations, data science, product, and more. 
• Create processes and evolve the team's operations to adapt to the growth of the business and organization. 

 

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of engineering management experience and 8+ years of software engineering experience. 
• Have a proven track record of sound business and technical judgment, back