Senior Engineering Manager (Search)

Role Overview

Lead Instacart’s Search engineering organization for key search experiences, including:

• Single-Retailer Search (SRS) and Cross-Retailer Search (XRS)
• Search suggestions and typeahead
• Whitelabel search for Storefront Pro retailers

You’ll set the strategy and drive execution for the search relevance/ranking systems and the underlying retrieval infrastructure, while managing and growing a senior engineering team.

Responsibilities

• Own the strategy and execution for SRS, XRS, search suggestions/typeahead, and whitelabel search
• Lead and grow a senior team of engineers
• Partner with embedded MLEs and ML leads on relevance, ranking, and infrastructure for Instacart 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
• Lead cross-functional technical programs from strategy through launch with high standards for quality and reliability

Requirements

• Strong technical depth in machine learning and large-scale distributed/backend systems; able to set direction with staff-level engineers
• Experience building or leading search/recommendations/ranking applied ML systems (as a manager or senior IC)
• 4+ years of engineering management experience; 10+ years total engineering experience
• Direct familiarity with modern retrieval techniques, including:
  • Neural/semantic retrieval
  • ANN
  • LLM-based query understanding or re-ranking
• Product and business judgment connecting ranking/modeling decisions to conversion and revenue; reasoning through tradeoffs (e.g., relevance vs. latency, organic vs. ads)
• Experience with ranking/personalization at scale (e.g., multi-stage rankers, multi-task deep models, embeddings, real-time/session features)
• Operate low-latency, high-throughput services with strict SLAs, including on-call and reliability ownership
• Experience in 0→1 or ambiguous ownership areas and driving alignment across teams
• Experience with LLMs in production and experimentation/A-B testing infrastructure
• Exposure to two-sided marketplaces, e-commerce, or ads-adjacent ranking problems

Nice-to-haves

• Not explicitly stated beyond the requirements; alignment to marketplace/ads-adjacent and advanced retrieval/re-ranking experience is strongly implied.