Director, Software Engineering

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing essential services for customers and flexible opportunities for Personal Shoppers. They are seeking a Director of Software Engineering to lead the Catalog Content team in building intelligent systems that enhance catalog accuracy and efficiency across the platform.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• 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