[Hiring] Principal Product Manager, Ads Quality @Instacart

Role Description

As a Principal Product Manager on the Ad Product team, you will own the strategy for Ads Quality across the Sponsored Products franchise. You will partner with engineering, design, data science, and user research to build a virtuous flywheel between advertisers, customers, and retailers; and to help define the future of how online grocery works.

• Create surface-level controls that balance customer value and advertiser value across Sponsored Products.
• Drive a high-velocity experimentation program in merchandising, ranking, and relevance, with a goal of shipping experiments that deliver multi-million dollar ARR impact.
• Develop a comprehensive strategy for evolving our ranking and monetization systems to better represent customer intent per ad request.
• Lead system design for complex ranking and relevance systems in partnership with Machine Learning engineers, and advance improvements to core retrieval and ranking that power Sponsored Products.
• Establish yourself as a thought leader on search and how to monetize it as a surface, sharing your point of view internally and externally with partners and industry leaders.
• Define how Sponsored Products evolve in new experiences such as agentic commerce and conversational UIs.
• Partner closely with engineering, design, data science, and UX research to turn ambiguous, high-stakes problems into clear hypotheses, requirements, and measurable outcomes.

Qualifications

• Experience with paid search or Sponsored Products advertising.
• Experience building machine learning products, including ranking, relevance, or recommendation systems.
• Experience with consumer-facing digital product work at a large, complex technology company.
• Strong analytical skills and data science savvy, with a record of using data to guide product decisions and design experiments.
• Critical thinking and executive presence, with the ability to present complex subject matter to senior leaders and build cross-organizational buy-in.
• Willingness to travel approximately 25% of the time.

Requirements

• BS or MS in computer science, economics, or a related field.
• 7-10 years of product management experience, including ownership of product lines generating $100M+ in revenue.
• Fluency in data science and machine learning concepts.

Benefits

• Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits.
• Remote work flexibility under the Flex First remote work policy.
• New hire equity grant and annual refresh grants.

Company Description

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. Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward.