Instacart · 4 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 to customers while creating flexible earning opportunities for personal shoppers. The Senior Machine Learning Engineer will architect and develop a ranking backbone for search and recommendations, optimizing for various objectives and mentoring other engineers in the process.
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 (e.g., incrementality, LTV, habit formation) and build uplift/causal value models that move beyond short-term engagement
Develop production-grade Multi-Task Learning (e.g., shared encoders, MMOE/PLE task heads) to jointly learn relevance, propensity, margin, and churn risk—ensuring calibration, constraints, and explainability
Own the inference layer: goal-aware re-rankers, diversity and quality constraints, safe exploration, and millisecond-class latency optimization
Advance evaluation practices: online experiments, long-horizon cohort metrics, counterfactual evaluations, and attribution pipelines for tracking incremental GTV and retention
Partner across ads, infrastructure, product, and design teams to translate business goals into ranking policies and measurable ROI
Mentor ML engineers to build expertise in ranking, causal inference, and scalable serving systems
Qualification
Required
5+ years applying ML at scale (3+ years in technical leadership), with a proven track record improving ranking or recommendation systems in production
Demonstrated success in applying multi-objective or constrained optimization to balance relevance, revenue, margin, and user experience; experience with online testing and attribution beyond CTR
Strong coding (Python) and data fluency (SQL/Pandas), with expertise in classic ML techniques (e.g., XGBoost) and deep learning frameworks (TensorFlow/PyTorch)
Excellent analytical skills and strong cross-functional communication abilities
Preferred
Expertise in multi-task learning architectures (e.g., MMOE/PLE, shared encoders), calibration, counterfactual evaluation, uplift/causal modeling, and/or contextual bandits for exploration
Experience building low-latency ranking services, including feature stores, caching, vector + lexical retrieval, re-ranking, and A/B testing infrastructure, with expertise in constraint-aware inference
Hands-on experience with LLMs as feature/recall enhancers (e.g., embeddings, adapter tuning) while maintaining clarity on 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
initialized.com
2026-01-14
2026-01-11
Company data provided by crunchbase