Senior Software Engineer, Instacart

• This is a hybrid role for a builder who can not only write production-grade code but also actively design and train intelligent systems
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science (or related field), or equivalent experience
• 5 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages
• 2 years of experience with machine learning algorithms and tools, or artificial intelligence
• Hands-on experience with fundamental ML concepts and tools
• Demonstrated ability to work in cross-functional teams and partnering with ML engineers, product managers, and data scientists
• Willingness to learn new AI technologies and adapt to the iterative, experiment-driven workflow of ML projects
• Strong SQL skills to derive insights from data

Desirable

• In this role as a Senior Software Engineer, you will sit at the intersection of core backend engineering and applied machine learning
• You will identify opportunities to apply intelligence by training your own lightweight models and heuristics to solve immediate product needs
• Beyond your own modeling work, you will partner closely with Machine Learning Engineers to operationalize their research and deploy complex models at scale
• You will architect the full lifecycle from feature selection and model integration to building the services and data pipelines that run them in production
• Whether you are developing a custom re-ranking algorithm or optimizing inference latency for a deep learning model, you will own the end-to-end technical execution where systems meet AI
• You will join the Search and Personalization team, the central engine that powers discovery across the entire Instacart marketplace
• We own the search experience end-to-end, from the moment a user types a query to the final ranking of results
• Beyond search, we drive the personalization intelligence that underpins systems across the entire company, ensuring every customer sees the most relevant products and recommendations
• We function like a high-velocity startup within a well-established organization, combining massive scale with the agility to experiment and innovate
• Join us to build the adaptive, intelligent core of Instacart that transforms a simple grocery run into a personalized shopping journey
• Design and implement backend features that incorporate ML/AI: Develop enhancements to Instacart’s systems(search, recommendations, etc.) using your own lightweight ML techniques
• You will identify product needs and independently build solutions such as a re-ranking module that boosts diverse items, simple logistic regression models for personalization, or prompt engineering workflows for content generation
• Collaborate on productionizing complex models: Work closely with Machine Learning Engineers to integrate their advanced research models (such as deep recommendation engines) into production services
• You will handle the software architecture for model serving, optimize inference performance, and ensure these models run reliably and efficiently at high scale
• Develop data-driven algorithms and heuristics: Create robust pipelines for data aggregation and rule-based heuristics to power features like "trending items" or "popular searches."
• You will write efficient queries or real time pipelines to compute these metrics and integrate the results into user-facing feeds
• Implement and monitor evaluation metrics: Adopt a debug-first and analytical mindset for all intelligent features
• You will design offline evaluation methods to validate your improvements before launch and develop dashboards to track performance metrics such as accuracy, latency, and drift in the production environment
• Maintain high engineering standards: Ensure that all code meets Instacart’s quality standards
• You will write unit and integration tests for both backend services and ML pipelines, conduct code reviews, and ensure the systems you build are scalable, maintainable, and easy to debug