Principal Product Manager, Ads Quality
About The Position
Instacart Ads powers a retail media ecosystem, helping brands connect with shoppers on the Instacart Marketplace and more than 310 partners. Sponsored Products is a core advertising format whose growth depends on product merchandising and display, as well as relevance, ranking, and personalization that create value for customers and advertisers. The Principal Product Manager on the Ad Product team owns the strategy for Ads Quality across the Sponsored Products franchise. The role partners with engineering, design, data science, and user research to build value for advertisers, customers, and retailers and to shape the future of online grocery. It is remote, with flexibility to work from home, an office, or another preferred location, alongside regular in-person events. Approximately 25% travel is expected. The role is focused on balancing customer and advertiser value, improving merchandising, ranking, and relevance through high-velocity experimentation, and evolving ranking and monetization systems to better reflect customer intent on each ad request. It also leads system design for complex ranking and relevance systems with Machine Learning engineers, advances core retrieval and ranking, develops a point of view on monetizing search, and defines Sponsored Products for emerging experiences such as agentic commerce and conversational user interfaces. Compensation varies by permanent work location. The role is eligible for a new-hire equity grant and annual refresh grants.
Requirements
- 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.
Nice To Haves
- 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.
Responsibilities
- 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, aiming to ship experiments with multi-million-dollar ARR impact.
- Develop a comprehensive strategy for evolving ranking and monetization systems to better represent customer intent for each ad request.
- Lead system design for complex ranking and relevance systems in partnership with Machine Learning engineers.
- Advance improvements to the core retrieval and ranking systems that power Sponsored Products.
- Establish a point of view on search and its monetization as a surface, sharing it internally and externally with partners and industry leaders.
- Define how Sponsored Products evolve in new experiences such as agentic commerce and conversational user interfaces.
- Partner with engineering, design, data science, and UX research to turn ambiguous, high-stakes problems into clear hypotheses, requirements, and measurable outcomes.
Benefits
- New-hire equity grant and annual refresh grants.
- Market-competitive compensation and benefits; benefit details are referenced but not specified in the posting.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
No Education Listed
