Senior Engineering Manager, Search

Senior Engineering Manager, Search

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry, believing everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. We are building the team to push our shopping cart forward and invite you to do the best work of your life.

Instacart is a Flex First team, offering the flexibility to choose where you do your best work while staying connected through regular in-person events.

About the Role

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America. Search is the most critical way customers discover and add products to their cart. This role will lead a dedicated Search engineering team, owning the strategy and execution for Single-Retailer Search, Cross-Retailer Search, search suggestions, typeahead, and whitelabel search solutions. This is a heavily machine learning-weighted team operating one of Instacart's largest revenue surfaces, at the forefront of applied search and ranking.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the team's technical strategy, roadmap, and goals across various search functionalities, including query understanding and Ads on Search.
• Drive top-line growth while maintaining a strict quality bar.
• Champion the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in search.
• Partner with the platform team to design and implement the next-generation search retrieval architecture, managing latency and reliability for a tier-1 surface.
• Enhance experimentation velocity by investing in evaluation, AI-native debugging tooling, and ML foundations.
• Collaborate closely with ML, Product, Data Science, platform teams, the Ads organization, and whitelabel retailer teams to translate ranking changes into business and retailer outcomes.
• Hire, develop, and coach engineers, fostering an inclusive, high-trust team culture.
• Contribute to technical and architectural decisions while focusing on setting direction, removing blockers, and growing team members.

Requirements

• 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, including neural/semantic retrieval, Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN), and LLM-based query understanding or 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 and ranking decisions to key metrics and understanding tradeoffs.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, effectively bridging technical and non-technical partners.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with ranking and personalization at scale.
• Experience operating low-latency, high-throughput services with strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• Experience leading a 0→1 or ambiguous product area.
• 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.

What We Offer

• Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits.
• Remote work flexibility.
• Eligibility for new hire equity grants and annual refresh grants.
• The opportunity to work on a critical, high-impact product at a leading tech company.

Location: Remote (Canada) Provinces of Hire: Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. Base Pay Range (CAD): $229,000—$241,500 USD