Principal Product Manager, Ads Quality

We're transforming the grocery industry

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. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.

Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.

Instacart is a Flex First team

There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.

Overview

Instacart Ads powers one of the industry's leading retail media ecosystems, helping brands connect with shoppers at the moment of intent on Instacart Marketplace and 310+ partners. Sponsored Products is our anchor format, and its growth depends on how we merchandise and display products to consumers as well as the relevance, ranking, and personalization that drive customer and advertiser value.

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.

About the Job

• 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 UI’s

• Partner closely with engineering, design, data science, and UX research to turn ambiguous, high-stakes problems into clear hypotheses, requirements, and measurable outcomes

About You

Minimum 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.

#LI-Remote Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here.

Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.

For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.

CA, NY, CT, NJ $250,000—$264,000 USD

WA $239,000—$252,500 USD

OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI $230,000—$242,500 USD

All other states $209,000—$220,500 USD