Senior Financial Analyst

About Instacart

At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food, believing everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. We see exciting complexity and endless opportunity in serving our community's varied needs, delivering essential groceries and household goods. We also offer safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers. Instacart has become a lifeline for millions, and we are building the team to push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, join our table.

Instacart is a Flex First team, meaning 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 through regular in-person events.

Overview of the Role

The Instacart Strategic Finance team partners across the company to drive profitable growth and smart investment in our 4-sided marketplace. This Senior Financial Analyst role will support our Fulfillment, Order Quality, and Payments areas, transforming complex operational trends into clear financial insights that inform decisions at scale. You’ll join a small, high-impact team with significant visibility and the ability to influence approximately $1B in annual spend. You will work closely with Product, Engineering, Data Science, and Partnerships to shape forecasts, evaluate initiatives, and guide resource allocation. As the third team member, you will own meaningful scope from day one.

We’re seeking a highly analytical, detail-oriented finance professional who also sees the big picture. If you thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment, enjoy rolling up your sleeves in SQL and Excel, and are energized by presenting insights to senior leaders, this role is for you.

What You Will Do

• Partner cross-functionally to design and maintain driver-based financial models that power forecasting, strategic decision-making, and initiative prioritization for the Fulfillment organization.
• Own short- and long-range P&L planning for Order Quality and Payments line items; build scenarios and quantify trade-offs to guide investment decisions.
• Conduct ad hoc financial modeling and KPI-based analyses; self-serve data using SQL; build dashboards that translate operational trends into financial impact.
• Lead monthly and quarterly performance and forecast reviews; synthesize insights for leadership; support materials for board and investor relations presentations.
• Improve forecast accuracy and speed through scalable reporting, variance analyses, and automation; proactively identify risks and opportunities that move key results.

What You Bring

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, Economics, Finance, Business, or a related field.
• 4–6 years of experience in a relevant field (e.g., Strategic Finance, FP&A, consulting, or investment banking) with a track record of leveraging data for business impact.
• Advanced Excel financial modeling skills, including scenario/sensitivity analysis and KPI-driven forecasting.
• Proficiency in SQL for self-serve analytics (e.g., complex joins, window functions, aggregations).
• Experience with data visualization and dashboarding (e.g., Looker, Tableau, or similar) to communicate insights to stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in consulting, investment banking, or Strategic Finance at a high-growth technology company.
• Background with marketplace or gig economy businesses and/or exposure to payments, fraud, and order quality domains.
• Comfort presenting complex analyses to senior leadership and partnering effectively with Product, Engineering, Data Science, and Operations stakeholders.

Key Skills/Competency

• Financial Modeling
• SQL
• Data Visualization
• P&L Management
• Forecasting
• Strategic Analysis
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• KPI Analysis
• Scenario Planning
• Stakeholder Management