AI Engagement Manager

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 The Enterprise AI Pod is a forward-deployed, field-first unit within Instacart's Enterprise Solutions team — purpose-built to take the Instacart Intelligence Platform to market with B2B retail and CPG partners. As the AI Engagement Manager, you are the operational backbone of the engagement — the person who makes complex, multi-stakeholder AI engagements actually move. This is an orchestration role, not a commercial one; success is measured by getting partners to value, not by signings or P&L. You own the partner relationship from discovery through workflow adoption, hold the team accountable to delivery, and serve as the primary bridge between field execution and R&D — all while managing multiple engagements simultaneously in an environment where the playbook is still being written. About the Job Own the full AI engagement arc . From first discovery through sustained workflow adoption — serving as the external partner's single point of contact across every phase while driving scope, timelines, milestones, and escalations and keeping cross-functional workstreams aligned and moving. There is no "launch and hand off" in this model. Drive requirements and delivery precision. Shape engagement structure, align on objectives, translate partner needs into a clear execution plan, and track against it with rigor. Surface risks early and keep stakeholders — partner and internal — ahead of problems, not behind them. Champion continuous quality. In AI engagements there's no single gate — value is proven iteratively. You oversee the testing and feedback loops that ensure the platform is performing against real partner workflows, track adoption progress, and stay on top of the change management work that determines whether a deployment becomes a lasting behavior change. Hold the R&D feedback loop. You are accountable for ensuring field learnings flow back to R&D and that R&D delivers on agreed roadmap commitments. When either side of the loop breaks down, you own the escalation. Build playbooks. Identify reusable patterns across engagements and turn them into scalable delivery frameworks the whole pod can use. We are early; what you build now will become the foundation for how this team operates at scale. Own engagement economics. Track the full cost structure of every active engagement — resource allocation across the pod, time spent per workstream, and cost card inputs — and maintain a running view of cost-to-deliver across the portfolio. Surface cost/benefit signals to inform prioritization and go/no-go decisions on new engagements. As the pod scales, your cost data becomes the foundation for delivery efficiency benchmarks. This is a field-first role. Travel is part of the job — expect to be on-site at partner locations during key engagement phases, with travel that could reach 50%+ at peak. Presence matters in this model. Abou