Senior Engineering Manager, Search

ABOUT THE ROLE We're seeking a seasoned Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Search team at Instacart, a leading grocery technology company in North America. As a key member of our engineering leadership team, you will be responsible for owning the strategy and execution of our Single-Retailer Search, Cross-Retailer Search, search suggestions, and typeahead features. This is a heavily ML-weighted team operating one of Instacart's largest revenue surfaces, and one of the most exciting frontiers in applied search and ranking. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead and grow a senior team of engineers responsible for the relevance, ranking, and infrastructure behind Instacart Search. Your key 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 Large Language Models (LLMs) in search. - Partnering with the platform team to design and ship the next-generation search retrieval architecture, while managing latency and reliability tradeoffs. - Doubling the team's experimentation velocity by investing in evaluation, AI-native debugging tooling, and ML foundations. - Collaborating with cross-functional teams, including ML, Product, Data Science, and Ads, to translate ranking changes into business and retailer outcomes. - Hiring, developing, and coaching engineers, and building an inclusive, high-trust team culture. WHAT YOU'LL NEED To be successful in this role, you will need: - 4+ years of engineering management experience leading high-performing teams, with a minimum of 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. - A track record of driving complex, cross-functional technical programs from strategy through launch while maintaining a high bar for quality and reliability. - Demonstrated product and business judgment, with the ability to connect modeling and ranking decisions to metrics like conversion and revenue. WHY REMOTE Instacart is a Flex First team, which means we offer the flexibility to choose where you do your best work, whether that's from home, an office, or a coffee shop. We believe that flexibility is key to productivity and happiness, and we're committed to creating a culture that supports and empowers our employees to work in a way that's best for them. BENEFITS Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation, including a salary range of $200,000 - $300,000 per year, depending on experience. We also offer comprehensive benefits, including health insurance, parental leave, education stipend, and flexible schedule.