Engineering Manager, Cross Retailer Search
Instacart
We're transforming the grocery industry
At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.
Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.
Instacart is a Flex First team
There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.
Overview
Instacart’s Cross Retailer Search (XRS) team is building the discovery engine that seamlessly connects customers to millions of items across thousands of retailers, helping them find the right store and the right products—fast. As the Engineering Manager for XRS, you will lead the team responsible for our multi-retailer ranking and retrieval systems, advancing multi-task learning, personalization, and generative AI to improve engagement, increase gross transaction value, grow basket size, and strengthen customer retention.
You’ll partner closely with a dedicated product manager, tech lead, applied scientists, and data scientists to deliver low-latency, reliable, and measurable improvements to the experience and to retailer visibility on this critical surface. This role is open to candidates across the U.S. and Canada and is remote flexible. We value rolling up our sleeves, communicating openly, and solving creatively as one team. If you thrive in a fast-moving environment where your work directly impacts customers and partners at scale, this team will feel like home.
About the Job
You will guide the strategy, execution, and people development for a high-impact engineering team driving the future of cross-retailer discovery at Instacart.
- Lead and grow a full stack team of 7+ engineers, providing clear goals, coaching, and opportunities that elevate performance, quality, and engagement.
- Own the technical roadmap for cross-retailer ranking and retrieval, delivering low-latency, high-availability services that scale to millions of items across thousands of retailers.
- Partner with Product, Applied Science, and Data Science to define success metrics, design online experiments, and deliver measurable uplifts in CTR, conversion, GTV, and customer retention.
- Advance the production ML stack (feature pipelines, candidate generation, vector search, re-ranking), ensuring strong observability, reliability, and cost efficiency.
- Deploy cutting-edge approaches—multi-task learning, personalization, and generative AI signals—to improve relevance while balancing customer value and retailer visibility.
- Champion engineering excellence, including code quality, incident response, privacy and responsible AI practices, and continuous improvement in operational metrics.
About You
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 7+ years of experience building large-scale backend and/or ML-powered systems for search, recommendation, or ads, including 2+ years directly managing a team of 5+ engineers.
- Proficiency in at least one of: Python, Java, or Go, with a strong foundation in distributed systems and cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP).
- Hands-on experience delivering and operating production ranking/retrieval stacks (e.g., Elasticsearch/OpenSearch or vector search), feature/data pipelines (e.g., Kafka, Spark, or Flink), and online experimentation (A/B testing).
- Proven track record of driving measurable business impact (e.g., CTR, conversion, revenue/GTV) through data-driven product and engineering decisions in a fast-paced environment.
Preferred Qualifications
- Advanced degree (MS/PhD) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.
- Experience with multi-task learning, personalization, and integrating LLMs or generative signals into retrieval and ranking.
- Background architecting low-latency search systems at marketplace scale with strong observability, SLOs, and cost controls.
- Demonstrated success hiring, coaching, and scaling teams while fostering an inclusive, high-trust culture.
- Experience balancing customer outcomes and partner visibility in multi-sided marketplaces, with familiarity in privacy and responsible AI practices.
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.
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.
For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.
