Director, Software Engineering @Instacart
Software Development
Salary usd 254,000 - 3..
Remote Location
Job Type full-time
Posted 2d ago

[Hiring] Director, Software Engineering @Instacart

2d ago - Instacart is hiring a remote Director, Software Engineering. 💸 Salary: usd 254,000 - 321,000 per year 📍Location: USA, Canada

Role Description

Instacart's 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.

  • 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.

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.

Benefits

  • Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits.
  • Remote work flexibility across the U.S. and Canada.
  • New hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.
Before You Apply
remote Be aware of the location restriction for this remote position: USA, Canada
Beware of scams! When applying for jobs, you should NEVER have to pay anything. Learn more.
Director, Software Engineering @Instacart
Software Development
Salary usd 254,000 - 3..
Remote Location
Job Type full-time
Posted 2d ago
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remote Be aware of the location restriction for this remote position: USA, Canada
Beware of scams! When applying for jobs, you should NEVER have to pay anything. Learn more.
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Interview Scheduled
Interview Completed
Offer Accepted
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