Senior Product Manager

• Instacart Ads powers one of the industry’s leading retail media networks, enabling Instacart and its retailer partners to deliver highly relevant, effective advertising experiences at scale

• As part of the Ad Product team, you’ll sit at the intersection of machine learning, marketplace dynamics, and measurable business impact — helping shape the future of how brands connect with shoppers across the Instacart platform

• We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager to own the systems that drive core auction understanding and marketplace balance within our Ads Quality domain

• This is a high-impact, technically complex space where your work will directly influence the health of the ads ecosystem — from how auctions are structured and optimized to how quality signals inform ranking and relevance

• You’ll partner closely with a team of talented machine learning engineers and ads engineers who are building at the frontier of what’s possible in retail media

• If you’re energized by ambiguous, high-stakes problems, fluent in the language of ML and online advertising, and eager to accelerate experimentation in a fast-moving environment — this is the role for you

• Own the product vision and roadmap for ads quality systems, including auction mechanics, marketplace balance, and the signals that govern ad ranking and relevance across Instacart’s retail media network

• Drive the strategy and execution for increasing the velocity of experimentation across the ads quality team — designing frameworks that allow the team to test, learn, and iterate faster without sacrificing rigor or integrity

• Work hands-on with machine learning engineers and ads engineers to translate complex ML model outputs and auction dynamics into clear product requirements, hypotheses, and measurable outcomes

• Define and track the right success metrics for ads quality, navigating tradeoffs between advertiser performance, shopper experience, and marketplace health — and communicating those tradeoffs clearly to senior stakeholders

• Operate in a fast-paced, constantly evolving environment where priorities shift, new data surfaces frequently, and the ability to make good decisions under uncertainty is essential to moving the business forward

Qualifications

• 2+ years of product management experience in online advertising, ad tech, or a closely related domain — with a demonstrated understanding of auction mechanics, bidding systems, or ad quality signals

• Proven track record of defining and executing on product roadmaps in complex, data-rich environments with multiple cross-functional stakeholders

• Strong analytical skills with experience using data to inform product decisions, measure impact, and design experiments

• 2+ years of experience working directly with machine learning teams or ML-driven products, with the ability to engage substantively in technical conversations about model design, evaluation, and tradeoffs

• Hands-on familiarity with large language models (LLMs) and how they can be applied within ads or ranking systems

• Experience working with ads machine learning models in a production environment, including relevance scoring, auction optimization, or quality filtering

• Prior experience at a retail media network, demand-side platform, or supply-side platform, with exposure to the full advertising stack

• Comfort operating in ambiguous, high-growth environments where structure and process are still being built — and an eagerness to help build them