Senior Machine Learning Engineer (L5) - Content AI/Recommendations

We're transforming the grocery industry

At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.

Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.

Instacart is a Flex First team

There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.

Overview

We are looking for experienced Senior Machine Learning Engineers to solve challenging problems like enhancing real-time recommendation algorithms, designing feed ranking systems, and improving personalized discovery. Your work will directly impact initiatives such as replacement recommendations, contextual discovery suggestions, and home feed ranking, driving meaningful improvements in our customer experience.

About the Job

• You will be designing, developing, testing, and deploying machine learning models focused on recommendations and ranking.
• You will build scalable ML services to facilitate the deployment of models at a large scale.
• You will take ownership of the entire development lifecycle of machine learning solutions, from ideation and design to deployment and maintenance, ensuring delivery with speed and efficiency.
• You will stay at the forefront of machine learning advances, including generative AI, LLMs, and innovative recommendation technologies.
• You will collaborate with software engineers and product managers to define and influence features that address customer challenges.

 

About You

Minimum Qualifications:

• Advanced degree (Master’s or PhD) in AI / Machine Learning, or 3+ years of industry experience in machine learning.
• Strong engineering skills with expertise in R or Python and fluency in data manipulation (SQL, Pandas) and machine learning (scikit-learn, XGBoost, Keras/Tensorflow) tools.
• Strong analytical skills and a proven ability to deploy ML models in production environments with tangible business impact.
• Self-motivation and a strong sense of ownership.

 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Advanced degree (Master’s or PhD) in AI / Machine Learning with 5+ years of industry experience applying machine learning to real-world, large-scale datasets.
• Expertise in deep learning frameworks, generative AI, or LLMs.
• Specialized knowledge in personalization, recommendation systems, learning-to-rank or NLP technologies.
• Nice to have: Experience with training large-scale models and model deployment on cloud services (Docker, AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Strong engineering skills with expertise in R or Python and fluency in data manipulation (SQL, Pandas) and machine learning (scikit-learn, XGBoost, Keras/Tensorflow) tools.
• Strong analytical skills and a proven ability to deploy ML models in production environments with tangible business impact.
• Self-motivation and a strong sense of ownership.

 

Why Join Us?

At Instacart, we prioritize ownership, customer focus, and fast-paced innovation. Join our team and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of online grocery shopping through impactful machine learning solutions.

Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here.

Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.

For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.

CA, NY, CT, NJ$179,000—$199,000 USDWA$172,000—$191,000 USDOR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI$165,000—$183,000 USDAll other states$149,000—$165,000 USD Apply