Instacart

Director of Engineering, Catalog Content

Instacart

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Remote

Location: CaliforniaColoradoUnited States

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Salary

💰 $254,000 - $321,000 per year

Job Level

About the role

  • 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.

Requirements

  • 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.
Benefits
  • Annual equity grants
  • Highly market-competitive compensation
  • Flexible work arrangements
Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools
software engineeringdata pipelinesAI/MLcloud environmentsevent-driven architecturesmicroservicesplatform reliabilitydata qualityincident managementlarge-scale platforms
Soft Skills
leadershipcross-functional collaborationteam buildingcoachingperformance managementorganizational skillscommunicationtransparencyinclusioncontinuous improvement
Certifications
Bachelor’s degree in Computer ScienceBachelor’s degree in Engineeringrelated technical field