[Remote] Senior Engineering Manager, Search

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with over 1,800 retail banners to provide online shopping, delivery, and pickup services. The role involves leading a senior team of engineers to own the strategy and execution for various search functionalities, driving growth and maintaining quality in search relevance and ranking.

Responsibilities

• 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
• Champion the use of LLMs in search
• 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
• Double the team's experimentation velocity by investing in evaluation, AI-native debugging tooling, and ML foundations
• 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
• You'll roll up your sleeves on technical and architectural decisions as needed, while spending most of your time setting direction, removing blockers, and growing the people on your team

Skills

• 4+ years of engineering management experience leading high-performing teams, with minimum 10+ years of total engineering experience
• Direct experience building or leading search, recommendations, ranking, or other applied ML systems, as a manager or as a senior individual contributor
• Familiarity with modern retrieval techniques, including neural/semantic retrieval, ANN, and LLM-based query understanding or re-ranking
• Strong technical depth across machine learning and large-scale distributed/backend systems; able to set direction with and earn the trust of staff-level engineers
• A track record of driving complex, cross-functional technical programs from strategy through launch while holding a high bar for quality and reliability
• Demonstrated product and business judgment: able to connect modeling and ranking decisions to metrics like conversion and revenue, and to reason through tradeoffs (e.g., relevance vs. latency, organic vs. ads)
• Strong communication and stakeholder skills; comfortable bridging technical and non-technical partners
• 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

Benefits

• Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work.
• This role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.
• Please read more about our benefits offerings here (https://instacart.careers/taste-of-instacart/).
• Please review our Flex First remote work policy here (https://instacart.careers/flex-first/).

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