Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Instacart

• Have a graduate degree (masters or PhD) in artificial intelligence, machine learning or equivalent self study and experience
• Have 7+ years of industry experience using machine learning to solve real-world problems with large datasets
• 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

Desirable

• 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
• Search & Discovery ML: The Search and Discovery ML team at Instacart is at the forefront of applying cutting-edge AI technologies, including large language models (LLMs), to revolutionize how customers find products
• Working alongside world-class engineers, data scientists, and product managers, we're building sophisticated machine learning and AI systems that power the future of search and recommendations at Instacart
• Our team leverages state-of-the-art transformer architectures, multimodal AI, and generative models to enhance the relevance across all shopping surfaces
• We're constantly innovating with advanced neural retrieval methods, LLM-powered ranking algorithms, and AI-driven personalization systems that deliver highly contextual and intuitive results to users throughout the Instacart ecosystem
• As part of our team, you'll tackle one of the most critical aspects of the business—helping customers connect with exactly the right products through AI
• We're solving complex, large-scale search challenges using the latest in deep learning, natural language understanding, and LLM fine-tuning techniques to create intelligent systems that truly understand user intent and shopping behavior
• Our commitment to AI innovation is reflected in our recent publications and research contributions to the field (Recent publications 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• Design, develop, and deploy advanced AI and machine learning solutions, including LLMs and neural networks, to solve complex challenges in our dynamic marketplace environment
• Architect and implement state-of-the-art deep learning systems that leverage transformer models, multimodal AI, and generative techniques to create intelligent, adaptive solutions
• Collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, and backend engineers to translate business requirements into cutting-edge AI applications that deliver measurable impact
• Pioneer the application of foundation models, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning methodologies to create AI systems that understand context and user intent at unprecedented levels
• Engage with diverse stakeholders to ensure our AI solutions are ethically implemented, well-integrated with existing systems, and fully aligned with strategic business objectives
• Drive continuous innovation in our AI infrastructure by researching, testing, and implementing the latest advancements in machine learning, from embeddings and vector databases to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)
• Push the boundaries of operational efficiency through intelligent automation, predictive modeling, and algorithmic optimization powered by our custom-trained AI systems