Senior Product Manager, Risk Platform

Overview

Instacart’s Platform team powers the foundational capabilities behind our marketplace and Storefront Pro, including order management, pricing and discounting, loyalty, payments, fraud, and customer experience. We’re hiring a Senior Product Manager to build and own Instacart’s Risk Platform: the shared infrastructure behind fraud detection, appeasements, and identity verification across our four-sided marketplace of customers, shoppers, retailers, and advertisers. You’ll set the north star for what this platform becomes, define the roadmap and sequencing to get there, and own the outcomes to build the platform.

What Makes This Team Unique

Instacart’s Fraud, Appeasements & Identity team sits at the intersection of platform infrastructure and real-world commerce, protecting millions of transactions across a four-sided marketplace. 

In this role, you will own the end-to-end product vision and roadmap for how Instacart prevents fraud, verifies identity, and resolves order disputes fairly. A core challenge is navigating the tension between cost efficiency and delivering a fast, fair customer experience - shaping fraud and appeasement policies with cross-functional partners that protect the business without degrading the customer experience that drives growth. You'll drive measurable impact on cost per order, fraud losses, and customer experience by evolving our real-time decision platform, advancing ML-driven fraud models, and shaping the next generation of AI-native fraud defense.

On the fraud and identity side, you'll own a real-time ML-powered decision platform and build the next generation of AI-native fraud defense. The industry is undergoing a generational shift from rules-based to AI-first fraud prevention, and you'll define Instacart's strategy for it.

On the appeasements side, you'll tackle one of the most interesting product challenges in commerce: how do you make customers whole quickly and fairly when something goes wrong, while maintaining thoughtful safeguards against abuse? Every customer-facing commitment we make builds the trust that drives loyalty and growth, and also requires careful product and policy design to manage cost responsibly. You'll design the systems and policies that solve this tension at scale, working across Order Quality, CX, Legal, and Finance.

Ultimately, you’ll set the roadmap to define and build a new piece of platform infrastructure at Instacart to power risk decisioning across all our product surface areas.

About The Job

 

• Own the fraud, identity, and appeasements product vision, strategy, and multi-year roadmap. Set a clear north star with quantified targets for fraud losses, cost per order, false positive rates, and customer experience - and regularly socialize that vision with leadership and cross-functional partners.
• Drive the evolution of Instacart's real-time fraud detection and identity platform - including ML model strategy, decisioning, identity verification (selfie, passkeys, ATO prevention), and account integrity across both marketplace and Storefront Pro. Optimize the balance between fraud prevention and customer experience.
• Champion an AI-native, AI-first approach to fraud and trust. Drive opportunities to apply AI/ML innovations across the full domain. Push beyond incremental rule tuning toward a fundamentally AI-first architecture.
• Lead the appeasements and order-issue resolution strategy - defining policies, guardrails, and product capabilities that balance fair customer treatment with abuse prevention. Partner with Order Quality, CX, and Legal to shape policies where customer-facing commitments require thoughtful safeguards. Drive measurable improvements to efficiency.
• Be the strategic leader, not just the executor. Proactively identify new opportunities, define the "where we go next" narrative, and produce clear product reviews that demonstrate depth, ambition, and clear trade-off analysis. Don't wait for partner teams to tell you what to build - own the direction.
• Partner closely with Data Science, ML Engineering, and Fraud Operations to define PRDs, scope ML model improvements, and translate complex fraud signals into scalable product capabilities. Leverage operational insights while maintaining independence of judgment on strategic direction.
• Collaborate across Platform, Payments, Order Management, Shopper, Legal, and CX teams to ensure fraud and trust capabilities are embedded across Instacart's full commerce stack - from checkout to post-order to international expansion. Stay ahead of the evolving fraud landscape, including organized fraud-as-a-service, AI-generated abuse, and emerging attack vectors.

Minimum Qualifications

• 6+ years of product management experience, including 3+ years focused on fraud, trust & safety, risk, identity, or a related high-stakes platform domain.
• Demonstrated ability to set product vision and strategy independently - not just execute on a defined roadmap, but define the north star, build conviction with leadership, and drive a multi-year narrative with measurable goals.
• Proven track record driving measurable business outcomes in fraud prevention or risk management - such as reducing fraud losses, improving authorization/approval rates, lowering false positive rates, or optimizing cost per order.
• Strong experience working with ML/data science teams on fraud detection models, risk scoring, or decisioning platforms. Comfort with data and experimentation (SQL, analytics tools, A/B testing) to size opportunities, validate hypotheses, and measure impact rigorously.
• Demonstrated success working cross-functionally with engineering, operations, data science, finance, legal, and compliance - with strong written and verbal communication skills to produce compelling strategy documents and build confidence in direction.
• Bachelor's degree in business, engineering, computer science, or a related field; equivalent practical experience considered.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

 

• Experience applying AI/ML innovations to fraud, identity, or trust & safety - such as shipping GenAI/LLM-powered products, building AI-native detection/decisioning systems, or leveraging graph neural networks and multimodal analysis. Strong preference for candidates who think AI-first, not rule-first.
• Experience building for multi-sided marketplaces and/or enterprise/white-label platforms, with an understanding of how fraud controls need to adapt for different partner models and user types (customers, shoppers, merchants, advertisers).
• Experience leading or influencing without direct authority in an operational environment (e.g., working with Fraud Ops, Trust & Safety Ops, or Risk Operations teams).

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