Base Salary
$173k - $254k/yr
Responsibilities
- Architect a ranking backbone unifying query understanding, personalization, multi-objective ranking, ads, and merchandising.
- Build personalized, value-based search autosuggest and long-horizon objective functions focused on incrementality, LTV, and habit formation.
- Develop production-grade multi-task learning, uplift, causal value, re-ranking, and safe-exploration systems.
- Own millisecond-class inference optimization, quality and diversity constraints, calibration, explainability, and evaluation pipelines.
- Advance online experiments, cohort metrics, counterfactual evaluation, and attribution for incremental GTV and retention.
- Partner with ads, infrastructure, product, and design teams to translate business goals into ranking policies and measurable ROI.
- Mentor ML engineers in ranking, causal inference, and scalable serving systems.
Requirements
- At least 5 years applying machine learning at scale, including at least 3 years in technical leadership and a proven record improving production ranking or recommendation systems.
- Experience with multi-objective or constrained optimization, online testing, and attribution beyond click-through rate.
- Strong Python coding and data fluency with SQL and Pandas.
- Expertise in classic machine learning techniques such as XGBoost and deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch.
- Graduate degree, specifically a master’s or PhD, in machine learning, statistics, computer science, information retrieval, or a closely related field.
- Preferred experience with multi-task learning architectures such as MMOE, PLE, and shared encoders; calibration; counterfactual evaluation; uplift or causal modeling; and contextual bandits.
- Preferred experience building low-latency ranking services with feature stores, caching, vector and lexical retrieval, re-ranking, A/B testing infrastructure, and constraint-aware inference.
- Preferred hands-on experience using LLMs for feature and recall enhancement, including embeddings and adapter tuning.
- Strong analytical, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
Benefits
- Remote Flex First work arrangement, allowing employees to work from home, an office, or another preferred location with regular in-person events.
- Eligibility for a new hire equity grant and annual refresh grants.
- Benefits and compensation vary by permanent work location.
Categories
About Instacart
Instacart is a leading grocery technology company that partners with more than 2,200 retail banners – representing nearly 100,000 stores – to transform how people shop for the groceries they need from the retailers they trust, while creating flexible earning opportunities for shoppers. Through the Instacart Marketplace, Instacart Enterprise platform, and Instacart Ads ecosystem, the company powers ecommerce, fulfillment, in-store technology, AI offerings, and advertising for partners. With Instacart Health, the company is providing tools to increase nutrition security, make healthy choices easier for consumers, and expand the role that food can play in improving health outcomes. For more information, visit www.instacart.com/company.