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. [https://instacart.careers/remote/]
Overview
AI Special Projects is a newly formed, agile team driving the next wave of
innovation at Instacart. The team’s charter is to reimagine our core consumer
experience with AI. We are tackling some of the company’s biggest growth bets,
including generative recommendation systems, hyper-personalized marketing
content, and unique customer experiences such as personalized meals.
Additionally, we are paving the way for AI-native development across the company
by driving advancements in event-driven architectures and other paradigms that
will impact a broad range of applications.
We build with a modern, AI-native Python stack with minimal legacy tech debt.
This empowers us to move quickly, experiment, and focus on pursuing the
highest-impact opportunities.
As a technical lead on the team, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping the
future of Instacart's AI platform offerings. This role provides the opportunity
to elevate AI at Instacart by applying advanced industry architectures,
innovating upon them, and deploying them to improve experiences for our
customers and retailers.
From Day 1, you will arrive as a leader on the team with significant scope and
influence. This includes contributing through your product mindset, technical
vision, strong execution, and mentorship. If a culture of bottom-up innovation
and deep ownership resonates with you, we’re excited to meet you!
About the Job
In this role, you will:
- Build the team vision: Partner with cross-functional leaders to define key
business challenges and design AI-first solutions that unlock substantial
value for customers and stakeholders.
- Drive hands-on execution: Lead the development of personalized content and
recommendation systems by leveraging a mix of generative and traditional
machine learning architectures to drive core business outcomes.
- Deploy AI systems at scale: Drive end-to-end software development, including
building ML services, agentic workflows, managing experiment lifecycles, and
deploying production-ready AI solutions at scale.
- Innovate: Stay at the cutting edge of AI innovation by conducting literature
reviews and exploring novel paradigms in recommendation systems (RecSys).
Identify opportunities for customization and apply these advancements to meet
Instacart’s unique needs.
- Elevate the team: Mentor and guide junior team members, fostering learning,
engagement, and technical growth within the team.
About You
Minimum Qualifications:
- Expertise in Generative AI technologies, including prompt engineering, model
fine-tuning, and familiarity with emerging AI trends and AIQA processes.
- Strong background in traditional machine learning and deep learning
fundamentals, with hands-on experience building efficient models using
frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow.
- Professional software development skills, including building data pipelines
(SQL/Spark), managing CI/CD workflows, and deploying models into production
environments.
- Product-focused mindset with a bias for action and proven ability to define
and solve complex business problems through cross-functional collaboration.
- Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders
and translate technical insights into actionable business strategies.
- An innovation-driven mindset, rooted in curiosity and a passion for pushing
the boundaries of applied AI.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience building scalable ranking and recommendation systems.
- Application of ML models within an e-commerce environment.
- Cloud infrastructure expertise (e.g., AWS, GCP), particularly in managing
large GPU workloads for training and inference.
- Demonstrated success as a technical leader, with the proven ability to guide
teams toward strategic, high-impact outcomes.
- Technical influence evidenced by contributions to blogs, published papers, or
industry thought leadership.
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
[https://instacart.careers/flex-first/]. Currently, we are only hiring in the
following provinces: Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia.
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 [https://instacart.careers/taste-of-instacart/].
For Canadian based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate
are listed below.
CAN
$203,000—$225,000 USD
