Instacart · 2 months ago
Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Search & Recommendations Ranking
United States
Full-time
Remote
Senior Level
$237K/yr - $263K/yr
5+ years expInstacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing essential services for customers and flexible earning opportunities for Personal Shoppers. The Senior Machine Learning Engineer will architect a ranking backbone for search and recommendations, focusing on multi-objective ranking and long-term value optimization while collaborating with cross-functional teams.
Delivery ServiceE-CommerceGroceryShopping
Responsibilities
Architect the ranking backbone that unifies query understanding, personalization, multi-objective ranking, ads, and merchandising into a single adaptive platform
Design long-horizon objective functions (incrementality, LTV, habit formation) and build uplift/causal value models that move us beyond short-term engagement
Develop production-grade MTL (e.g., shared encoders, MMOE/PLE task heads) to jointly learn relevance, propensity, margin, and churn risk—calibrated, constrained, and explainable
Own the inference layer: goal-aware re-rankers, diversity and quality constraints, safe exploration, and millisecond-class latency
Advance evaluation: online experiments, long-horizon cohort metrics, counterfactual/randombucket evaluation, and attribution pipelines for incremental GTV and retention
Partner across ads, infra, product, and design to translate business goals into ranking policies and measurable ROI
Mentor ML engineers, growing depth in ranking, causal inference, and large-scale serving
Qualification
Required
5+ years applying ML at scale (3+ in technical leadership), with a track record improving ranking/recommendation systems in production
Proven impact using multi-objective or constrained optimization to balance relevance, revenue, margin, and UX; experience with online testing and attribution beyond CTR
Strong coding (Python) and data fluency (SQL/Pandas); solid with classic ML (e.g., XGBoost) and deep learning (TensorFlow/PyTorch)
Excellent analytical skills and cross-functional communication
Preferred
Expertise in multi-task learning (MMOE/PLE, shared encoders), calibration, counterfactual evaluation, uplift/causal modeling, and/or contextual bandits for exploration
Experience building low-latency ranking services (feature stores, caching, vector + lexical retrieval, re-ranking, A/B infra) and constraint-aware inference
Hands-on with LLMs as feature/recall enhancers (embeddings, adapter tuning) with a clear understanding of when the ranker should arbitrate
Benefits
New hire equity grant
Annual refresh grants
Company
Instacart
Instacart is an online grocery platform that offers same-day delivery and pickup services for retailers and consumers.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Instacart has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (156)
2024 (173)
2023 (111)
2022 (159)
2021 (170)
2020 (59)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$2.92BKey Investors
T. Rowe PriceTiger Global ManagementD1 Capital Partners
2023-09-19IPO
2021-11-01Private Equity· $232M
2021-09-05Secondary Market
Leadership Team
Chris Rogers
Chief Executive Officer
Brandon Leonardo
Co-Founder
Recent News
2026-01-11
2026-01-09
Company data provided by crunchbase