Sr Software Engineer II - Ads Manager (Front End)

About the role

This role owns the frontend technical direction for the Ads Manager self-serve platform, which advertisers use to create, manage, and optimize campaigns, and leads large multi-quarter initiatives across campaign creation, reporting, and the design system. It suits senior engineers with 8+ years building modern web applications and deep Node.js and React experience who will mentor engineers up to L5.

What you'll do

• Lead the technical roadmap and architecture for Ads Manager web applications, balancing near-term delivery with long-term scalability
• Design, build, and maintain high-quality React UIs for campaign creation, management, reporting, and optimization
• Define and evolve shared components, state management, and abstractions to make the surface easier to extend and maintain
• Partner with backend teams on API and data contracts that are robust, observable, and cost-efficient
• Collaborate with other frontend leads and peers to align on frontend standards and best practices
• Champion observability, performance, and reliability, including metrics, logging, tracing, and on-call readiness for critical flows
• Drive modernization and technical debt paydown, including migrations and refactors of legacy frontend code
• Embed security-by-design into frontend architecture and lead response to significant security or reliability issues in the Ads Manager UI
• Propose and lead team-wide and cross-team initiatives on behalf of the EM, aligning stakeholders and driving execution
• Work with designers to build a best-in-class user experience
• Mentor and sponsor engineers up to L5, improve onboarding and team practices, and help resolve cross-team execution issues
• Help define how the team uses AI-assisted development tools for code, tests, and refactors, including patterns and best practices

What you'll need

• 8+ years of experience building modern web applications, with substantial ownership of complex, user-facing products
• Deep expertise in Node.js and React (hooks, state management, performance tuning) in large codebases
• Strong skills in frontend architecture: modularization, shared components, routing, data fetching, and error handling
• Experience designing and integrating with REST and/or GraphQL APIs, working closely with backend teams
• Proven track record leading large, ambiguous, multi-stakeholder projects from design through rollout and operations
• Demonstrated impact on team productivity and code health through abstractions, tooling, testing, and CI improvements
• Experience with monitoring and observability for web apps (e.g., Datadog or similar)
• Comfortable using AI-assisted developer tools in day-to-day work and interested in scaling their use across the team
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills with engineers, PMs, designers, and other partners

Nice to have

• Experience leading large-scale, data-heavy UIs such as analytics dashboards, editors, or complex workflows
• Hands-on experience with GraphQL at scale (schemas, client patterns, performance)
• Experience with automation testing frameworks such as Selenium, Cypress, or Playwright
• Deep experience with frontend performance and reliability (bundle optimization, code-splitting, resiliency patterns)
• Led modernization efforts or major migrations (framework upgrades, design system adoption, legacy deprecation)
• Experience with common design tools such as Figma
• Track record mentoring L3–L5 engineers and acting as a go-to expert for a domain or surface area

Benefits listed by Instacart

• Flex First remote work policy
• New hire equity grant
• Annual refresh equity grants

Tools & skills mentioned