Instacart

Senior Engineering Manager, Search

United States - Remote · Senior

Sponsorship not specified$265k-$280kDetected 28 days ago

Machine LearningData ScienceLLMsA/B TestingRecruitingCommunication

About the role

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,800 retail banners to provide online shopping, delivery and pickup services from more than 100,000 stores.
Search is the single most important way customers find and add products to their cart, and Cross-Retailer Search is how we help people decide not just what to buy, but where to shop.
Together they sit at the top of the discovery funnel, where improvements in relevance and ranking compound directly into conversion, retailer engagement, and growth.

Own the team's technical strategy, roadmap, and goals across Single and Cross retailer search, query understanding, suggestions, Ads on Search.
Drive top-line growth while holding a strict quality bar.
Partner with the platform team to design and ship the next-generation search retrieval architecture, while managing the latency and reliability tradeoffs of a tier-1 surface.
Partner closely with ML, Product, Data Science, the Home and Discovery Platform teams, the Ads organization, and whitelabel retailer teams to translate ranking changes into business and retailer outcomes.
Hire, develop, and coach engineers, and build an inclusive, high-trust team culture.
Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we're building the team to help push our shopping cart forward.

4+ years of engineering management experience leading high-performing teams, with minimum 10+ years of total engineering experience.
Familiarity with modern retrieval techniques, including neural/semantic retrieval, ANN, and LLM-based query understanding or re-ranking.
A track record of driving complex, cross-functional technical programs from strategy through launch while holding a high bar for quality and reliability.

Experience with ranking and personalization at scale: multi-stage rankers, multi-task deep models, embeddings, and real-time/session-based features.
Experience operating low-latency, high-throughput services with strict SLAs, including on-call and reliability ownership.
Experience leading a 0→1 or ambiguous product area, and driving alignment across teams where ownership boundaries are still forming.
Experience working with LLMs in production, and with experimentation/A-B testing infrastructure.
Exposure to two-sided marketplaces, e-commerce, or ads-adjacent ranking problems.
Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role.
For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.
All other states

Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work.

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.

We are standing up a dedicated Search engineering team and are looking for a seasoned engineering leader to run it.
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.

This listing is sourced directly from Instacart's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.