# Senior Engineering Manager, Search

**Company:** [Instacart](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/instacart)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Engineering Management
**Salary:** $221k – $280k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** Machine Learning, Search Systems, Ranking Algorithms, Neural Retrieval, Ann, LLMs, Large-Scale Distributed Systems, Backend Systems, A/B Testing, Experimentation
**Posted:** 2026-06-04

> Lead and grow a senior engineering team building Instacart's search and ranking systems (Single- and Cross-Retailer Search, suggestions, Ads on Search). Own technical strategy, roadmap, ML infrastructure, and team growth for one of Instacart's largest revenue surfaces.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Own the team's technical strategy, roadmap, and goals across Single and Cross retailer search, query understanding, suggestions, Ads on Search.
- Drive top-line growth while holding 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, while managing the latency and reliability tradeoffs of a tier-1 surface.
- Double the team's experimentation velocity by investing in evaluation, AI-native debugging tooling, and ML foundations.
- Partner closely with ML, Product, Data Science, the Home and Discovery Platform teams, the Ads organization, and whitelabel retailer teams to translate ranking changes into business and retailer outcomes.
- Hire, develop, and coach engineers, and build an inclusive, high-trust team culture.
- Roll up sleeves on technical and architectural decisions as needed.

## Requirements
- 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.

## Nice-to-Haves
- 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.

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