
Director of Engineering, Catalog Content
Instacart
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Remote
Location: California • Colorado • United 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