Senior Strategic Finance Manager – Partnerships

ABOUT THE ROLE We're transforming the grocery industry at Instacart, where we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. As a Senior Strategic Finance Manager, you will be a key partner to the Growth Partnerships team, driving growth and scaling our user base through strategic partnerships. This is a high-visibility, high-impact role operating at the intersection of strategy, finance, and commercial deal-making. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Senior Strategic Finance Manager, you will be responsible for evaluating, pricing, and structuring growth partnerships, and partnering with the team to manage an existing portfolio of deals. Your key responsibilities will include: - Serving as the finance partner to the Growth Partnerships team, being deeply involved in deal strategy and negotiations from early ideation through term sheet execution - Developing effective frameworks to evaluate a high volume of potential partnerships, including establishing deal guardrails to protect Instacart's unit economics and drive growth - Leading financial modeling for all growth partnerships, working to translate the partnership opportunity into decision-ready economics and identify areas to improve the commercial terms - Designing partnership constructs from a customer lens to drive growth at an acceptable ROI, payback period, and CAC/LTV - Partnering closely with Data Science to define how Instacart measures partnership incrementality and align partnership terms to measurable growth outcomes - Owning the driver-based budget and forecast for the full partnerships portfolio, integrating partnership economics into company-wide planning cycles - Creating executive-level materials and presenting recommendations to Commercial, Product, and Finance leadership - Establishing and strengthening internal governance and review mechanisms to ensure consistent, rigorous deal review across a high-volume pipeline - Tracking portfolio performance against expectations, identifying risks and opportunities, and developing the analytics and reporting cadence needed to manage the business - Crafting compelling narratives around deal thesis and performance, with the ability to simplify nuance for executive audiences WHAT YOU'LL NEED To succeed in this role, you will need: - 8-10 years of relevant experience in Strategic Finance, investment banking, or consulting, with demonstrated ownership over complex deals or partnerships - Proven experience supporting growth partnerships from the finance side, with the ability to evaluate, structure, and support many deals from ideation to execution - Expert financial modeling skills, with the ability to build complex, deal-specific models that describe novel partnership structures and translate them into decision-ready economics - Deep fluency in deal economics, including ROI, CAC/LTV, payback, rev-share structures, pricing floors, minimum guarantees, incrementality, and membership unit economics - Ability to operate with high autonomy in an ambiguous environment, with experience building strong business partnerships with cross-functional stakeholders - Proficiency in SQL to self-serve data for model building, performance tracking, and ad hoc analysis - Executive-level communication skills, with the ability to distill complex financial analysis into clear narratives and recommendations - Exceptional attention to detail paired with the ability to zoom out to the big picture - Strong cross-functional fluency and a track record of effective collaboration with Product, Data Science, Legal, and Commercial teams - Bachelor's degree in Finance, Economics, Business,