Staff Data Scientist, Instacart

Shopper Engagement

$198-265k

Salary dependent on location + New hire equity grant

SQL
Python
Pandas
Scikit-Learn
Flask
Snowflake
PyTorch
Git
Senior and Expert level
Remote in US
Instacart

Online grocery marketplace & grocery tech platform

Open for applications

Instacart

Online grocery marketplace & grocery tech platform

1001+ employees

B2CB2BArtificial IntelligenceEnterpriseMarketplaceFoodAnalyticsComputer VisionSaaSMobileAdvertisingDelivery

Open for applications

$198-265k

Salary dependent on location + New hire equity grant

SQL
Python
Pandas
Scikit-Learn
Flask
Snowflake
PyTorch
Git
Senior and Expert level
Remote in US

1001+ employees

B2CB2BArtificial IntelligenceEnterpriseMarketplaceFoodAnalyticsComputer VisionSaaSMobileAdvertisingDelivery

Company mission

To create a world where everyone has access to the food they love and have more time to enjoy it together.

Role

Who you are

  • The role requires strong XFN collaboration
  • We’re looking for a self-driven, strategic thinker who can hit the ground running to ultimately influence decision-making across the entire organization
  • 6+ years of work experience in a data science or related field
  • Led a team to adopt at least one new metric with which to measure the performance of the team
  • Ran several sophisticated A/B tests at a company
  • Built a machine learning or statistical model that made its way into production even if the code you wrote was completely rewritten before being deployed
  • Experience with Python (pandas), SQL, git, and Jupyter notebooks

Desirable

  • 8+ years of work experience in a data science or related field
  • Led a cross-functional team to design a system of metrics that connected the business strategy to a set of core metrics and assigned ownership of those metrics to the team
  • Significant causal experimentation experience in environments with small sample sizes
  • Built a complex machine learning or statistical model and deployed/supported it in production
  • Experience with Python (pandas; scikit-learn, statsmodels, or PyTorch; a visualization library that is not matplotlib; a web framework such as flask), SQL (Snowflake), git, Jupyter notebooks

What the job involves

  • Instacart’s core product is grocery delivery. Grocery delivery relies on high quality shoppers picking, paying for, and delivering grocery orders to customers
  • The Shopper team builds the technology to power each of these steps with the Engagement team focusing on maximizing batches fulfilled by high quality shoppers
  • You would be responsible for driving Engagement data science work which includes:
  • Product strategy: Using data to identify the most promising opportunity areas along with contributing data expertise to refine and develop new product ideas
  • Impact sizing: Providing an estimated impact of implementing a new feature
  • Impact measurement: Running an experiment to determine the actual impact of newly launched product features
  • Intelligent systems: Improving a product feature by adding intelligent functionality to the product that relies on data science methods including statistical and machine learning methods
  • The two most important responsibility areas of this role are product strategy and intelligent systems
  • The best products are built with diversity of thought. Data scientists uniquely understand the available data, the business domain, and the advanced methods that can be applied to the data to drive the desired business outcome
  • There are two primary methods data scientists would add value in product strategy:
  • Clearly articulate the right problem to solve to the team by providing a data-driven understanding of the problem area with the team as well as convincing the team of the most promising opportunity areas within the problem space
  • Contribute product ideas that leverage intelligent systems to solve the problems identified while collaborating closely with product, research, design, and engineering teams on the overall solution
  • Intelligent systems make products smarter by combining deep domain expertise with advanced statistical or ML approaches
  • Data scientists are uniquely positioned to combine their understanding of the domain and advanced statistical methods to rapidly iterate on different approaches to building an intelligent system to solve an ambiguous problem
  • They would invest time in creating the initial version of the intelligent systems while partnering with MLEs and SWEs to maximize the impact, scalability, and maintainability of the system
  • Drive critical efforts to completion with little oversight, while occasionally jumping into roles adjacent to data science (i.e. data engineering, machine learning engineer, etc)
  • Bring new ideas to the team that get incorporated into the product roadmap
  • Ruthlessly prioritize among requests from multiple competing stakeholders
  • Act as a senior cross-functional leader of the team, aligning the team on principles, processes and goals, and mentoring junior colleagues
  • 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

Our take

Instacart is an online grocery marketplace that operates a pick-up and delivery system in the US and Canada. Unlike standard grocery shopping, Instacart sends a “personal shopper” to your local store to buy your products, who then delivers them straight to your door on the same day via their own car. The company also supplies the Instacart Platform, with services for stores encompassing eCommerce, fulfilment, in-store, ads, and insights.

The increased modernization of society has meant more than ever that consumers are looking to buy their groceries online, making space for apps like Instacart to become daily life staples for years to come. Although the company must compete with other grocery store delivery services, such as Walmart’s own, it has expanded to cover large percentages of US and Canadian households, and is now aligned with over 900 retail banners across more than 75,000 locations.

Instacart's software offerings signify the company's focus on tech, designed to move it away from its dependence on the gig economy. To this end, the company has acquired FoodStorm, an order management system that powers end-to-end order-ahead and catering, integrating its technology into its enterprise suite. Despite an IPO in September 2023, market downturns have necessitated a 7% workforce cut in 2024, focused on middle management and creating a flatter organisational structure. With a new streamlined workforce, here's to hoping Instacart can maintain its momentum.

Steph headshot

Steph

Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle

Insights

Top investors

Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks

7% employee growth in 12 months

Company

Funding (last 2 of 14 rounds)

Nov 2021

$232m

LATE VC

Mar 2021

$265m

LATE VC

Total funding: $2.9bn

Company benefits

  • Wellness Tailored to You: Medical, dental, vision, retirement, life & disability coverage right alongside physical & mental wellness programs, memberships and stipends to keep you and your family feeling your best.
  • Family Building Benefits: No matter where you are in your family journey, we support you. Our plans cover modern family planning for all. We offer leave for all parents, flexible working schedules and an active Parents@ community.
  • Work From Home Stipend: We help outfit your WFH setup and offer reimbursements so you can be your most productive while at home.
  • Flexible Time Off: We all recharge differently. Take the time you need with our flexible time off policy and company-wide Self-Checkouts where we encourage everyone to sign off.
  • Learning & Development: Whether you're just starting your career or leading teams, we provide customized L&D programs to help you grow and an annual allowance to pursue your development.
  • Future Planning: We have you covered as you plan for your future. 401(k) matching in the US and RRSP in Canada, student loan assistance through Peanut Butter, free Rocket Lawyer membership, SoFi & First Republic financial planning and more.
  • Four Year Fill-Up: We encourage our tenured employees to take longer breaks and truly unplug by doing something they love – typically four consecutive weeks around the four year mark.
  • Community Connection: Support the communities you care about with volunteer weeks and get involved with our social impact program, Instacart Serves.
  • Instacart Express Membership: We help keep your fridge stocked. Unlock grocery discounts with our Instacart Beta app while testing our latest features.

Company values

  • Go far together
  • Roll up your sleeves
  • Grow the pie
  • Put it all on the table
  • Serve generously

Company HQ

The East Cut, San Francisco, CA

Leadership

Apoorva Mehta

(Co-Founder & Chairman)

Studied Electrical Engineering at University of Waterloo. Worked in Fulfillment Optimisation SDE at Amazon.com before going on to co-found Instacart.

Brandon Leonardo

(Co-Founder)

Interned at Cisco Systems as an IT Engineer. Later became a Senior Web Developer at Webs and then a Venture Hacker at Angel List.

Share this job

View 41 more jobs at Instacart