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
Instacarts Catalog Content team powers the product information that customers, shoppers, retailers, and brands rely on across our marketplace. We ingest, enrich, and validate massive, ever-changing datasets so customers can discover, compare, and purchase with confidence. We are seeking a Director, Software Engineering to lead the next chapter of our “agentic catalog” strategy—building intelligent, autonomous systems that elevate quality, speed, and scale across the entire catalog lifecycle.
In this role, you will lead a multi-team organization and partner closely with Product, Machine Learning, Data Science, Design, Operations, and our Retail and Brand partners. You will define the technical strategy and operating model to deliver best-in-class catalog accuracy, coverage, and freshness—at scale. If you thrive in fast-paced environments, enjoy rolling up your sleeves, and want to drive outsized impact on core customer experiences, this is the place to do your career-defining work.
This role is remote-friendly across the U.S. and Canada (in Ontario, BC, Alberta & Nova Scotia).
About the Job
- Own the end-to-end technical strategy for an agentic catalog platform, combining distributed systems, data pipelines, and AI/ML-driven automation to ingest, normalize, enrich, and validate product content at scale.
- Lead, organize, and scale a multi-team engineering organization of approximately 40+ total reports (including managers and senior ICs), setting clear goals, establishing robust operating mechanisms, and developing talent.
- Deliver platform reliability and quality by setting and meeting availability, latency, and accuracy SLAs; mature on-call, incident response, observability, and data-quality guardrails.
- Partner cross-functionally with Product, ML, Data Science, and Operations to prioritize roadmaps, run experiments, and ship features that improve discovery, search relevance, substitution quality, pricing accuracy, and regulatory compliance.
- Drive build/buy decisions, vendor selection, and budget stewardship for key capabilities (e.g., vector search, embeddings, OCR, image understanding, and content moderation) while ensuring privacy, security, and brand safety.
- Champion a culture of transparency, inclusion, and continuous improvement—aligning teams to clear outcomes, sharing progress openly, and celebrating wins that grow the pie for customers, shoppers, retailers, and brands.
About You
Minimum Qualifications
- 15+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating large-scale platforms or data-intensive systems.
- 7+ years of experience leading engineering managers and multiple teams, with direct responsibility for organizations of 30+ engineers.
- Proven experience delivering large-scale data pipelines and services (batch and streaming) in cloud environments (e.g., AWS or GCP), including event-driven architectures and microservices.
- Demonstrated ownership of platform reliability and data quality with defined SLAs/SLOs, on-call practices, and incident management.
- Track record shipping production systems that leverage ML/AI (e.g., LLMs, information retrieval, content understanding, or automated data enrichment) and integrating them into user-facing or platform workflows.
- Experience hiring, coaching, and performance-managing engineering managers and senior engineers; building diverse, high-performing teams.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Strong cross-functional collaboration experience with Product, Data Science/ML, and Operations to define roadmaps and deliver measurable business outcomes.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with e-commerce catalog systems, product taxonomy/ontology, data normalization, or content quality at marketplace scale.
- Hands-on familiarity with GenAI and agentic frameworks (e.g., orchestration, tool-use, retrieval-augmented generation), vector databases/embeddings, and multimodal models (text, image, OCR).
- Background in search/relevance, knowledge graphs, entity resolution, or compliance workflows (e.g., nutrition, allergens, age-restricted items).
- Demonstrated success leading platforms adopted by 100+ internal users or powering revenue-critical customer experiences.
- Master’s degree or higher in a related technical field.
- Experience managing vendor ecosystems and annual engineering budgets tied to infrastructure and third-party services.
- Familiarity with experimentation and evaluation frameworks for content quality (e.g., offline/online metrics, A/B testing) and robust observability for data drift and model performance.