Sr. Data Scientist

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. Data Science roles open across our 4-sided marketplace. You’ll get the chance to learn about the different problems the Data Science team solves 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. If you're targeting a senior title, you'll need to prove to the team that you're operating at that level. 

 

About the Team

You will be joining a growing data science team and will tackle some of the most challenging and impactful problems that are transforming how people buy groceries every day. You will be embedded within our data-driven product team as a trusted partner in uncovering barriers in the product’s usability and utilize these insights to inform product improvements that drive angle-changing growth. 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

• Own analytical frameworks that guide the product roadmap
• Design rigorous experiments and interpret results to draw detailed and actionable conclusions
• Develop statistical models to extract trends, measure results, and predict future performance of our product
• Build simulations to project impact of various product and policy interventions
• Enable objective decision making across the company by democratizing data through dashboards and other analytical tools
• Use expertise in causal inference, machine learning, complex systems modeling, behavioral decision theory etc. to shape the future of Instacart
• Present findings in a compelling way to influence Instacart’s leadership

 

ABOUT YOU

Minimum Qualifications

• 6+ years experience working in a quantitative role at a product company or a research organization
• Ability to run rigorous experiments and come up with scientifically sound recommendations
• Ability to write complex, efficient, and eloquent SQL queries to extract data
• Ability to write efficient and eloquent code in Python or R
• A desire to build and improve consumer software products
• Ability to translate business needs into analytical frameworks
• Eagerness to learn, flexibility to pivot when needed, savviness to navigate and thrive in a dynamic environment, and a growth mindset needed to build a successful team and company

 

Preferred Qualifications

• Awareness of business trade offs when working on a multi-sided marketplace 
• Confidence in collaborating with and influencing cross-functional stakeholders (i.e. Product, Engineering), at a senior level
• MS/PhD in Statistics, Economics, Applied Mathematics, or a similar field

 

OPEN ROLES:

Commerce Platform

This team is a key player in driving affordability for Insacart, through the promotion & adoption of retailer loyalty & discount programs. On this team, you'll engage in pricing optimizations at item, category, retailer, and geo levels to foster long-term customer growth. You'll evaluate the effects of the platform's performance improvements, such as latency reduction for ordering and invoicing. 

Growth & Marketing Tech

Instacart's marketing data science team serves as thought partners and problem solvers for the Growth and Marketing orgs, supporting our broader mission to give everyone access to the food they love. We are responsible for understanding the end to end scope of growth marketing, including how marketing shapes and impacts customer behavior both today and in the long run, the efficiency and performance of any marketing technology we utilize, and what the highest ROI investments are in both marketing and marketing technology. We synthesize our insights and knowledge into actionable tactics, optimizations, and strategy within marketing.

Marketplace Balancing & Coordination

We are looking for an experienced data scientist with a background in complex and dynamic marketplace problems. The successful candidate will take on a leading role working on Instacart’s core marketplace problems including shopper pay and incentives, marketplace balancing, and experimentation. The role will partner with senior product managers and engineers to tackle analytical, experimental, and inferential problems to understand and expand the efficient frontiers of a balanced, sustainable, and resilient multi-sided marketplace.

New Bets

The New Bets Data Science team exists to provide data-driven insights and strategic guidance around Instacart’s most promising emerging initiatives, collectively known as "new bets”. You will play a critical role in supporting these exciting new bets, including Instacart Business and Health, by establishing data foundations, discovering new opportunities, and evaluating success using your business judgement and experimentation. The position requires a scrappy, "startup-like" mindset, as you will partner closely with self-directed teams forming new business lines all while leveraging the knowledge and systems of Instacart's established marketplace.

 

#LI-Remote

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$185,000—$230,000 USDWA$177,000—$221,000 USDOR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI$170,000—$212,000 USDAll other states$153,000—$191,000 USD Apply