Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Instacart

• If you thrive in a fast-paced environment, enjoy rolling up your sleeves, and want to see your models make decisions in the real world every minute of every day, this team is for you
• You pair a deep toolkit in operations research and machine learning with strong software engineering fundamentals
• You’re motivated by real-world impact, communicate clearly with cross-functional partners, and take ownership from ideation to production
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Operations Research, Electrical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
• 5+ years of professional experience building and shipping ML and/or optimization systems to production
• 3+ years formulating and solving large-scale combinatorial optimization problems (e.g., VRP, matching, scheduling) using solvers such as OR-Tools, Gurobi, or CPLEX (MIP/CP-SAT) and heuristic methods
• Proficiency in Python and SQL, including writing production-quality code with testing, profiling, and code review practices
• Hands-on experience deploying algorithms/models as microservices with Docker and Kubernetes on a major cloud provider (GCP or AWS), including monitoring, alerting, and dashboards
• Experience designing and operating low-latency decision services in high-throughput environments (targeting sub-second P95 response times)
• Practical experience with A/B testing or online experimentation platforms, from hypothesis through analysis and rollout decisions
• Strong collaboration and communication skills with engineering, product, and data science stakeholders

Desirable

• Instacart’s Logistics organization powers the intelligence and execution behind our fulfillment system
• We’re hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join the Matching & Positioning team, a tight-knit group of 9 engineers and scientists focused on real-time decisioning for order batching, shopper routing, and assignment across a dynamic, multi-sided marketplace
• In this role, you’ll work at the intersection of operations research, combinatorial optimization, and machine learning to design and ship algorithms that directly impact profitability, on-time delivery, shopper experience, and customer satisfaction at scale
• You’ll collaborate closely with engineering, product, and data science partners to translate ambiguous problems into well-formed optimization and ML systems that operate under sub-second latency and high throughput
• You will build production-grade optimization and ML solutions that drive Instacart’s fulfillment decisions end-to-end in a rapidly evolving, high-scale environment
• Design, implement, and deploy algorithms for order batching, real-time shopper assignment, routing, and marketplace positioning using techniques such as MIP/CP-SAT, heuristics/metaheuristics, and learning-to-rank
• Own the full model lifecycle: problem formulation, data pipelines and features, offline evaluation and simulation, A/B testing, staged rollouts, and ongoing monitoring/observability
• Build reliable, low-latency services in Python (and, where performance dictates, C++ or Go) that integrate with solvers (e.g., OR-Tools, Gurobi, CPLEX) and run on cloud infrastructure with Docker/Kubernetes
• Partner with product, operations, and data science to define roadmaps and success metrics; deliver measurable impact to on-time rates, shopper utilization, cost per order, and customer experience
• Leverage experimentation and causal methods along with offline counterfactual replay/simulation to validate changes and de-risk launches
• Contribute to engineering excellence through code reviews, design docs, robust testing, and participation in an on-call rotation for mission-critical fulfillment services; mentor peers and raise the technical bar
• This is a fast-moving domain with evolving constraints and objectives. Success requires comfort with ambiguity, pragmatic prioritization, and a bias toward iterative learning and continuous improvement