Engineering Manager, Search - Instacart

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing online shopping, delivery, and pickup services. We believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. As a Flex First team, we offer flexibility in where our employees work while fostering connection through regular in-person events.

Overview:

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America. Search is critical for customers finding and adding products to their cart, and Cross-Retailer Search helps customers decide not only what to buy but where to shop. We are establishing a dedicated Search engineering team and are looking for a seasoned engineering leader to head it. You will own the strategy and execution for Single-Retailer Search (SRS), Cross-Retailer Search (XRS), search suggestions, typeahead, and whitelabel search for Storefront Pro retailers. This is an ML-heavy team operating one of Instacart’s largest revenue surfaces and a key frontier in applied search and ranking.

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. Your responsibilities will include:

• Owning the team’s technical strategy, roadmap, and goals across Single and Cross-retailer search, query understanding, suggestions, and Ads on Search.
• Driving top-line growth while maintaining a strict quality bar.
• Championing the use of LLMs in search.
• Partnering with the platform team to design and ship next-generation search retrieval architecture, managing latency and reliability tradeoffs.
• Doubling the team’s experimentation velocity through investments in evaluation, AI-native debugging tooling, and ML foundations.
• Collaborating closely with ML, Product, Data Science, Home and Discovery Platform teams, the Ads organization, and whitelabel retailer teams.
• Hiring, developing, and coaching engineers, and building an inclusive, high-trust team culture.

You will be hands-on with technical and architectural decisions as needed, while focusing on setting direction, removing blockers, and growing your team.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 4+ years of engineering management experience leading high-performing teams.
• 10+ years of total engineering experience.
• Direct experience building or leading search, recommendations, ranking, or applied ML systems as a manager or senior individual contributor.
• 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.
• 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, including on-call and reliability ownership.
• Experience leading 0→1 or ambiguous product areas and driving alignment across teams with evolving ownership boundaries.
• 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.

Compensation & Benefits:

Instacart provides market-competitive compensation and benefits. The base pay range depends on the candidate's permanent work location. Examples include:

• CA, NY, CT, NJ: $265,000—$279,500 USD
• WA: $254,000—$268,000 USD
• OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI: $243,000—$256,500 USD
• All other states: $221,000—$233,000 USD

This role is eligible for new hire and annual refresh equity grants. Benefits information can be found on our careers page.