[Remote] Senior Engineering Manager, Search

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with over 1,800 retail banners to provide online shopping, delivery, and pickup services. They are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a dedicated Search engineering team, focusing on the strategy and execution of search functionalities that drive customer engagement and revenue growth.ResponsibilitiesOwn the team's technical strategy, roadmap, and goals across Single and Cross retailer search, query understanding, suggestions, Ads on SearchDrive top-line growth while holding a strict quality barChampion the use of LLMs in searchPartner 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 surfaceDouble the team's experimentation velocity by investing in evaluation, AI-native debugging tooling, and ML foundationsPartner 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 outcomesHire, develop, and coach engineers, and build an inclusive, high-trust team cultureYou'll roll up your sleeves on technical and architectural decisions as needed, while spending most of your time setting direction, removing blockers, and growing the people on your teamSkills4+ years of engineering management experience leading high-performing teams, with minimum 10+ years of total engineering experienceDirect experience building or leading search, recommendations, ranking, or other applied ML systems, as a manager or as a senior individual contributorFamiliarity with modern retrieval techniques, including neural/semantic retrieval, ANN, and LLM-based query understanding or re-rankingStrong technical depth across machine learning and large-scale distributed/backend systems; able to set direction with and earn the trust of staff-level engineersA track record of driving complex, cross-functional technical programs from strategy through launch while holding a high bar for quality and reliabilityDemonstrated 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 partnersExperience with ranking and personalization at scale: multi-stage rankers, multi-task deep models, embeddings, and real-time/session-based featuresExperience operating low-latency, high-throughput services with strict SLAs, including on-call and reliability ownershipExperience leading a 0→1 or ambiguous product area, and driving alignment across teams where ownership boundaries are still formingExperience working with LLMs in production, and with experimentation/A-B testing infrastructureExposure to two-sided marketplaces, e-commerce, or ads-adjacent ranking problemsBenefitsInstacart is a Flex First teamOur 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.This role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.Company OverviewInstacart is an online grocery platform that offers same-day delivery and pickup services for retailers and consumers. It was founded in 2012, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA, with a workforce of 1001-5000 employees. Its website is https://www.instacart.com.Company H1B SponsorshipInstacart has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 23 in 2026, 152 in 2025, 173 in 2024, 109 in 2023, 159 in 2022, 170 in 2021, 59 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.