9 hours ago
Remote, CanadaSenior
Responsibilities
- Own research and development of pCTR and conversion prediction models across Instacart ads surfaces.
- Design debiasing and calibration methods including Mixed Negative Sampling, Inverse Propensity Weighting, counterfactual risk minimization, Platt scaling, and isotonic regression.
- Contribute to Multi-Domain Multi-Task architectures using Mixture-of-Experts, Transformer layers, and LoRA adapters.
- Advance sequence modeling, TIGER generative retrieval, Semantic ID representation learning, and foundation-model initiatives.
- Formulate ambiguous modeling problems, define evaluation criteria, conduct rigorous experiments, and communicate findings through internal publications and presentations.
Requirements
- Master’s or PhD in machine learning, statistics, computer science, information retrieval, or a closely related quantitative field, or equivalent experience.
- At least 3 years of combined academic and industry experience applying machine learning to ranking, recommendation, or prediction problems at scale.
- Deep understanding of CTR and conversion prediction architectures, including Deep & Wide, DeepFM, DCN, and multi-task learning.
- Strong foundation in causal inference, counterfactual reasoning, and training-data bias mitigation.
- Proficiency in Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, SQL, Spark, and Pandas.
- Experience formulating ambiguous problems into ML research directions and delivering results through rigorous experimentation.
- Preferred experience includes ads ranking or auction systems, autoregressive sequence models, generative retrieval, transformer-based ranking, Semantic IDs, product embeddings, transfer learning, domain adaptation, LoRA, adapter-based fine-tuning, relevant publications, and LLM-driven recommendation approaches.
Benefits
- Remote Flex First work arrangement, with hiring currently limited to Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia.
- Market-competitive location-based compensation and benefits.
- Eligible for a new-hire equity grant and annual refresh grants.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Instacart
Instacart builds a grocery technology platform used by retailers and consumers for online shopping, delivery, and pickup. Its business spans a consumer marketplace, enterprise e-commerce and fulfillment software, and a retail media ads network, generating revenue from fees, subscriptions, software, and advertising. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in San Francisco, the company is publicly traded on Nasdaq and operates across the U.S. and Canada.