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Overview
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.
About the Job
- 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.
About You
Minimum 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Preferred Qualifications
- 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.
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