Senior Machine Learning Engineer (L5/L6)

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

 

About the Role:

 

This is a general posting for multiple Sr. Machine Learning roles open across our 4-sided marketplace. You’ll get the chance to learn about the problems the different ML teams solve as you go through the process. Towards the end of your process, we’ll do a team-matching exercise to determine which of the open roles/teams you’ll join. You can find a blurb on each team at the bottom of this page. 

With regards to level, we have flexibility. Your level will be determined by your education, years of experience, and most importantly, how you perform throughout the interview process.

 

About the Team:

 

You will be joining our team and will tackle some of the most challenging and impactful problems that are transforming how people buy groceries every day.  We’re looking for a self-driven, strategic thinker who can hit the ground running to ultimately influence decision-making across the entire organization.

 

About the Job:

 

• Design, develop, and deploy machine learning solutions to tackle practical challenges in the our complex marketplace.
• Collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, and backend engineers to deeply understand business needs and create impactful ML applications.
• Actively engage with diverse stakeholders to ensure that solutions are well-integrated and aligned with business goals.
• Push the envelope on our operational efficiency by continually refining and advancing our algorithms and models.

 

About You:

 

Minimum Qualifications:

 

• Have a graduate degree (masters or PhD) in artificial intelligence, machine learning, operations research or equivalent self study and experience
• Have strong programming skills in Python and fluency in data manipulation (SQL, Pandas) and Machine Learning (scikit-learn, XGBoost, Keras/Tensorflow) tools
• Have strong analytical skills and problem-solving ability
• Are a strong communicator who can collaborate with diverse stakeholders across all levels

 

Preferred Qualifications:

 

• Have 5+ years of industry experience using machine learning to solve real-world problems with large datasets
• Knowledge of deep learning frameworks and methodologies
• Experience in productionalizing  machine learning and optimization techniques to solve marketplace problemm

 

OPEN ROLES:

 

Ads Marketplace: 

The Ads Marketplace team is responsible for the systems and algorithms for showing the right ad to the right user at the right time to balance user value, advertiser value, and instacart revenue. The team optimizes a multi-sided marketplace to ensure customers see ads that help them try new products/brands, advertisers get their products in front of appropriate users for a good return on investment, and instacart generates the deserving revenue as well. The team tackles hard problems in a variety of spaces, such as ranking, pricing, personalization, UX as well as foundational problems executing on a high throughput system with dynamic data. You'll develop and enhance Instacart's ads systems together with senior members of product & software engineering. You will use machine learning to devise and refine solutions throughout the ads auction such as ads selection, ranking, and pricing for all of Instacart’s consumer facing pages such as: search, storefront, aisle, pre and post checkout experiences, among many others. 

 

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$198,000—$258,000 USDWA$190,000—$248,000 USDOR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI$182,000—$237,000 USDAll other states$165,000—$214,000 USD Apply