Category Specialist

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- This role will have direct influence over how we operate in these categories across all of our retail partners’ storefronts, and will drive business impact through a mix of analytical rigor and operational excellence.

About the Team- We are hiring Category Specialists to own the performance of key categories across the entire Instacart platform.

About the Job

• Own a set of key categories (e.g., snacks, pet, baby, alcohol) with a focus on driving business results using a broad range of levers across the platform.
• Develop growth plans for key categories by analyzing trends on the Instacart platform and in the broader industry. Create actionable roadmaps and investment theses for how we can drive incremental growth in these categories.
• Drive and execute initiatives that lead to category growth. Work with cross-functional partners (particularly Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Commercial teams) to define and run experiments, test hypotheses, optimize collections, and improve product selection. Collaborate with cross-functional partners including Data Science to translate experiment results into category strategy recommendations.
• Own in-depth performance tracking for priority categories on a weekly basis. Analyze data to monitor category health, identify issues, diagnose performance challenges, and recommend course corrections on a near real-time basis. Operationalize and scale performance tracking to key stakeholders.
• Improve search and discovery by auditing results and working with cross-functional partners to improve attributes and data mapping.
• Elevate category-specific needs to Product to influence the R&D roadmap.
• Work with Marketing stakeholders to ensure we’re optimizing our approach to driving category growth through both dedicated category-focused marketing efforts and broader campaigns.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years previous experience in the grocery, retail, or CPG industry with demonstrated cross-functional and collaborative project experience, and a track record of significant business impact.
• Comfort with both risk and ambiguity, and skilled at creating organized and structured plans even in ambiguous contexts. Ability to work in a fast-changing environment, with an entrepreneurial approach.
• Strong analytics background with a proven ability to translate business needs into analytical frameworks. Ability to write complex, efficient, and eloquent SQL queries to extract data, along with experience in dashboard creation and root cause analysis.
• Experience designing and interpreting experiments to test hypotheses, ideally in an ecommerce environment.
• Ability to design and run operational processes to identify both short-term and long-term trends in key business metrics, and to surface these insights efficiently to senior cross-functional stakeholders.
• Strong written and visual communication skills serving cross-functional teams, management, and external stakeholders.
• Strong retailer and CPG empathy and an ability to understand what matters most to our commercial partners’ business.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree