Program Manager, Escalation Management

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 are seeking a Program Manager to orchestrate how Instacart responds to its most critical escalations, including executive-raised issues and issues from our most strategic retail partners. When something is urgent, ambiguous, and spans multiple teams, you bring clarity, drive resolution, and make sure it doesn’t happen again. This role reports to the Senior Manager of Customer Experience. You’ll be responsible for moving our model from reactive to proactive. That means defining the risk signals that trigger early intervention, building recovery paths for known risk vectors, and turning recurring issues into data-backed product change requests. This is a strategic and analytical role for a resourceful professional with strong judgment under pressure. It is critical for building a scalable escalation process that earns the trust of internal stakeholders and key retail partners. The Customer Experience team ensures that critical issues affecting our retailers, customers, and shoppers are resolved quickly and permanently. The team operates globally across a network of BPO partners and works closely with Product, Engineering, Operations, and Business Development to provide immediate resolution and address systemic root cause issues. About the Job Program Operations & SLA Governance: Run the escalation operating rhythm end to end: daily case review, weekly escalation review, monthly business review, and quarterly calibration of severity criteria. Keep meeting hygiene tight: agendas, decisions logged, and action items assigned with named owners and due dates. Manage a central tracker that captures every escalation signal and root-cause action and routes each to a named owner. Publish and drive SLAs, and report adherence, escalation cycle time, and signal-to-action lag to leadership weekly. [Targets to be set] Proactive Service Recovery: Define and maintain risk-detection signals that support early intervention. Design recovery paths for known risk vectors, so issues are resolved before users have to escalate. Root-Cause & Program Delivery: Identify and size the frequency and impact of patterns across escalations, and turn them into effective solutions that reduce repeat issues. Drive cross-functional execution with Product, Engineering, Operations, and the rest of Customer Experience so every signal has a destination, every action has an owner, and every outcome is measured. Data, Analytics & Reporting: Write SQL queries to investigate spikes, isolate root causes, and answer ad-hoc questions from CX, Product, and Operations leaders. Build and maintain dashboards and automated reporting tracking escalation volume, time to resolution, recurring themes, SLA adherence, and partner impact. Prepare leaders for key partner meetings, business reviews, and incident readouts with clear, quantifie