Director of Engineering, Instacart

• 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
• 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

Desirable

• 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
• 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