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
About the Team
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 taking on some of the company’s biggest growth bets
across generative recommendation systems, hyper-personalized marketing content,
and unique customer experiences such as personalized meals. Further, we are
paving the way for AI-native development across the company, driving
event-driven architectures and other paradigms forward that will impact a wide
range of applications. We build with a modern, AI-native Python stack with
minimal legacy tech debt. This allows us to move quickly, experiment, and
ruthlessly prioritize the highest-impact opportunities.
About the Role
As a technical lead on the team, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping the
future of our platform offerings. This role is your opportunity to elevate AI at
Instacart by applying the most advanced industry architectures, innovating upon
them, and deploying them to directly improve our product for our customers and
retailers. You will arrive from Day 1 as a leader on the team. This means
substantial scope and team influence through your product mindset, technical
vision, strong execution, and mentorship. We are fueled by a culture of
bottom-up innovation and deep ownership – if that resonates, 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 value for
customers and stakeholders.
- Drive hands-on execution: Lead the development of personalized content and
recommendation systems. This includes both generative and traditional ML
architectures, leveraging the best tool for the job to drive core business
outcomes.
- Deploy AI systems at scale: Drive end-to-end software development, building
ML services and agentic workflows, managing experiment lifecycles, and
deploying to production at scale.
- Innovate: Stay at the forefront of AI innovation by conducting literature
reviews, exploring novel paradigms in Recommendation Systems (RecSys), and
identifying where they can be applied and improved upon to meet Instacart’s
unique needs.
- Elevate the team: Mentor and guide junior team members, fostering engagement,
learning, and technical growth within the team.
About You
Minimum Qualifications
- Expertise in Generative AI technologies, including prompt engineering, model
fine-tuning, AIQA processes, and familiarity with emerging trends.
- Strong background in traditional machine learning and deep learning
fundamentals, with hands-on experience building performant models in
frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow.
- Professional software development skills, including experience building data
pipelines in SQL/Spark, managing CI/CD workflows, and deploying models to
production.
- Product-minded, with a bias for action and proven ability to define and solve
complex business problems with cross-functional collaboration.
- Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders
and translate technical findings into actionable business insights.
- An innovation mindset — driven by curiosity and a desire to push the
boundaries of what's possible in applied AI.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building scalable ranking and recommendation systems.
- Application of ML models within an e-commerce environment.
- Cloud infrastructure experience (e.g. AWS, GCP), particularly managing large
GPU workloads for training and inference.
- Track record of success as a technical leader, with proven ability to guide
teams toward strategic, high-impact solutions.
- Demonstrated technical influence through contributions to blogs or published
papers.
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 CAD
