Senior Engineering Manager, Search

Minimum qualifications

• 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.

Preferred qualifications

• 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.

#LI-Remote

Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here. Currently, we are only hiring in the following provinces: Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia.

Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.…