Principal Creative, Growth Production

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 Local Produce is Instacart's in-house creative agency. We build brand storytelling that is strategic, fun, and fresh, and we make grocery shopping feel effortless across film, photo, social, product surfaces, and experiential moments. We are hiring a Principal Creative, Growth Production to own the production engine behind our growth and direct response (DR) work. You will produce high-volume video and performance creative, run the operations that keep it moving, and build the systems that let the team scale without losing quality. You do the work and you oversee it. One week you are on set or in the edit review, the next you are rebuilding an intake process or negotiating a vendor rate card. You will join a tight-knit core senior production team of 4 within a 10-person production org and a 40-person agency. You will work directly with senior stakeholders in Growth and Marketing, make judgment calls on creative, operational, and business affairs questions in real time, and set the bar for how we produce. Responsibilities Own end-to-end production for growth and DR creative across video, photo, social, design, and AI-scalable formats, from brief through final delivery and platform-ready versioning. Run video production hands-on and at scale: testimonial, UGC, talent-led, short-form, and vertical content for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and paid media placements. Plan and produce for performance. Build modular shoots and asset systems that yield many cutdowns, hooks, and variants per production day, and work with Growth and Marketing partners to turn test results into the next round of creative. Translate briefs into production strategies, scopes, budgets, and timelines. Manage AICP-style bidding, cost tracking, and reconciliations to deliver on time and within budget. Build and maintain the creative operational systems for the growth team: intake and briefing, production calendars, asset naming and versioning, review and approval flows, delivery specs, and reporting. Document everything so the team can run it without you. Drive AI production workflows alongside traditional production. Know where AI tools speed up or replace conventional methods for iteration, versioning, and scale, and where they do not. Own Business Affairs responsibilities, including usage rights, licensing, talent and music clearances, and audit-ready deliverables, in partnership with Legal, Policy, and IP. Handle localization end to end: produce content in multiple languages (English and Spanish preferred) and manage the workflows that keep multilingual assets consistent and on time. Source, negotiate, and manage a diverse roster of production partners, including directors, DPs, editors, color, sound, finishing, music, and freelance creators, matched to the needs of each project and its budget. Lead pre-production and on-set operations: casting, lo