Senior Engineering Manager, Search

Engineering Manager, Search

Company: Instacart

About Instacart:
At Instacart, we're transforming the grocery industry by giving people access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. We provide an essential service, delivering groceries and household goods while offering flexible earnings opportunities to our Personal Shoppers. Instacart is a lifeline for millions, and we're building a team to help us move forward. Come join us and do the best work of your life! Instacart is a Flex First team, offering flexibility in where you work—home, office, or coffee shop—while staying connected through regular in-person events.

Overview:
Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with over 1,800 retail banners. Search is critical for customers discovering and adding products to their carts. Our Cross-Retailer Search initiative helps customers decide not just what to buy, but where to shop, impacting conversion, retailer engagement, and growth. We are establishing a dedicated Search engineering team and seeking a seasoned engineering leader.

About the Job:
You will lead and grow a senior team of engineers, partnering with embedded MLEs and ML leads, responsible for the relevance, ranking, and infrastructure behind Instacart Search. This role owns the strategy and execution for Single-Retailer Search (SRS), Cross-Retailer Search (XRS), search suggestions, typeahead, and whitelabel search. This is a heavily ML-weighted team operating one of Instacart's largest revenue surfaces.

Your Responsibilities:

• Own the team's technical strategy, roadmap, and goals across Single and Cross-retailer search, query understanding, suggestions, and Ads on Search.
• Drive top-line growth while maintaining 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, managing latency and reliability tradeoffs.
• Double the team's experimentation velocity by investing in evaluation, AI-native debugging tooling, and ML foundations.
• Collaborate closely with ML, Product, Data Science, Home and Discovery Platform teams, the Ads organization, and whitelabel retailer teams.
• Hire, develop, and coach engineers, building an inclusive, high-trust team culture.
• Engage directly in technical and architectural decisions as needed, while focusing on setting direction, removing blockers, and growing the team.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 4+ years of engineering management experience leading high-performing teams; 10+ years total engineering experience.
• Direct experience building or leading search, recommendations, ranking, or other applied ML systems (as a manager or senior IC).
• Familiarity with modern retrieval techniques (neural/semantic retrieval, ANN, LLM-based query understanding/re-ranking).
• Strong technical depth in machine learning and large-scale distributed/backend systems.
• Proven track record of driving complex, cross-functional technical programs from strategy through launch with a high bar for quality and reliability.
• Demonstrated product and business judgment, connecting modeling/ranking decisions to metrics like conversion and revenue.
• Strong communication and stakeholder skills, bridging technical and non-technical partners.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with ranking and personalization at scale (multi-stage rankers, multi-task deep models, embeddings, real-time/session-based features).
• Experience operating low-latency, high-throughput services with strict SLAs.
• Experience leading 0→1 or ambiguous product areas.
• Experience with LLMs in production and experimentation/A-B testing infrastructure.
• Exposure to two-sided marketplaces, e-commerce, or ads-adjacent ranking problems.

Compensation & Benefits (Canada):

• Base Pay Range: $229,000—$241,500 USD
• This role is eligible for a new hire equity grant and annual refresh grants.
• Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits.

Hiring Locations (Canada): Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia.