Software Engineering Manager, Catalog Interfaces

Overview

At Instacart, our mission is to create a world where everyone has access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Millions of customers every week use Instacart to buy their groceries online, and the Catalog Interfaces team is building the critical data models and access patterns that underpin all of the myriad of ways that data is used across Instacart to support our customers and partners

About the Team 

The Catalog Engineering team is responsible for ensuring that the best possible representation of products is available to customers, shoppers, and brands. They achieve this by ingesting data from retailers, third parties, and brands, and processing it to create world class and comprehensive product listings. The team handles various aspects of catalog management, including data acquisition, product ingestion, inventory management, quality assurance, and enrichment of product attributes. Our systems process approximately 8 billion updates each day. 

The Catalog Interfaces engineering team plays a critical role in defining how catalog data is structured and standardized for consistent, reliable, timely, and accurate product information. This is a high impact, high visibility role owning essential Catalog data models across all of Instacart’s offerings. You will enable efficient, high-quality services that power the platform behind every item browsed, discovered, or purchased at Instacart. 

About the Role 

As Engineering Manager, you’ll guide a team of talented software engineers to design and operate high throughput, low‑latency systems that deliver the most accurate product data to every Instacart experience—from shopper apps and retailer tools to cutting‑edge AI models. You will own Snowflake tables and views used by downstream teams and develop interfaces that power Instacart’s AI‑first commerce experiences.

You’ll partner closely with Product, Data, Ads, Retailer Platform, and Infrastructure teams to define technical strategy and simplify data access. This role is based in Canada (Toronto preferred) but is open to remote work across Canada in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia and Nova Scotia..

If you’re excited by distributed systems at massive scale, real‑time data challenges, and opportunities to shape the future of AI‑powered commerce, this team offers a chance for outsized impact in a fast‑paced environment

About the Job

• Own the technical strategy and roadmap for Catalog Interfaces—build unified, high scale APIs, drive adoption across dozens of internal teams, and deprecate legacy access patterns.
• Lead, develop, and grow a team of 6+ software engineers; hire great talent, provide coaching and feedback, and foster an inclusive, high‑trust, high‑ownership culture.
• Deliver reliable, low‑latency services that handle billions of catalog updates; define SLOs, mature on‑call operations, and optimize for operational excellence
• Partner cross‑functionally with Product, Data, Search/Ads, and Retailer Platform to prioritize impact, shape API contracts and data models, and land cross‑organization initiatives.
• Own Snowflake tables and views consumed by downstream users; implement data governance, access controls, and quality monitoring to ensure accuracy, lineage, and compliance.
• Design and evolve LLM context interfaces and retrieval patterns that safely and efficiently expose catalog data to AI/ML systems.
• Establish engineering best practices in SOA, schema/version management, testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident response to drive engineering excellence.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years managing software engineers as a people leader.
• Proven track record leading backend/platform teams that build and operate high‑scale, low‑latency APIs and distributed services handling millions of requests per day.
• Hands‑on experience with service‑oriented architectures, API design (REST and/or gRPC), data modeling, and schema/version management.
• Proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Go, Java, or Python) and building services on a major cloud provider (e.g., AWS or GCP).
• Experience running always‑on services: defining SLOs/SLAs, participating in on‑call rotations, leading incident response, and driving postmortem improvements.
• Direct experience with streaming and batch data systems (e.g., Kafka and Snowflake), including data quality frameworks, governance, and access controls for sensitive data.
• Demonstrated ability to define and deliver a technical roadmap, align stakeholders, and ship cross‑functional projects end‑to‑end.
• Experience hiring, coaching, and performance managing engineers; commitment to building an inclusive team environment.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background building or integrating LLM context interfaces, retrieval pipelines, or feature stores for AI/ML applications.
• Familiarity with data privacy, compliance, and role‑based access controls within high‑scale data platforms.
• Expertise with observability and reliability tooling and resiliency/chaos testing.
• Success driving platform adoption with multiple stakeholder teams, balancing long‑term platform investments with near‑term product needs.
• Domain experience in e‑commerce, marketplace, retail technology, or ads platforms.
• An advanced degree in a relevant field is a plus.

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