Instacart · 3 weeks ago
Senior Software Engineer, Core Ex AI Team
United States
Full-time
Remote
Senior Level
$195K/yr - $217K/yr
5+ years expInstacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing essential services for grocery delivery. The Senior Software Engineer will work at the intersection of core backend engineering and applied machine learning, developing and implementing intelligent systems to enhance product offerings and optimize user experiences.
Delivery ServiceE-CommerceGroceryShopping
Responsibilities
Design and implement backend features that incorporate ML/AI: Develop enhancements to Instacart’s systems(search, recommendations, etc.) using your own lightweight ML techniques. You will identify product needs and independently build solutions such as a re-ranking module that boosts diverse items, simple logistic regression models for personalization, or prompt engineering workflows for content generation
Collaborate on productionizing complex models: Work closely with Machine Learning Engineers to integrate their advanced research models (such as deep recommendation engines) into production services. You will handle the software architecture for model serving, optimize inference performance, and ensure these models run reliably and efficiently at high scale
Develop data-driven algorithms and heuristics: Create robust pipelines for data aggregation and rule-based heuristics to power features like "trending items" or "popular searches." You will write efficient queries or real time pipelines to compute these metrics and integrate the results into user-facing feeds
Implement and monitor evaluation metrics: Adopt a debug-first and analytical mindset for all intelligent features. You will design offline evaluation methods to validate your improvements before launch and develop dashboards to track performance metrics such as accuracy, latency, and drift in the production environment
Maintain high engineering standards: Ensure that all code meets Instacart’s quality standards. You will write unit and integration tests for both backend services and ML pipelines, conduct code reviews, and ensure the systems you build are scalable, maintainable, and easy to debug
Qualification
Required
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science (or related field), or equivalent experience
5 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages
2 years of experience with machine learning algorithms and tools, or artificial intelligence
Hands-on experience with fundamental ML concepts and tools
Demonstrated ability to work in cross-functional teams and partnering with ML engineers, product managers, and data scientists
Willingness to learn new AI technologies and adapt to the iterative, experiment-driven workflow of ML projects
Strong SQL skills to derive insights from data
Preferred
Experience deploying ML models into high-traffic production environments
Experience building data pipelines (batch vs. real-time) for ML features is beneficial
Ability to design systems that integrate ML components, covering areas such as model deployment, feature engineering, and update strategies
Ability to design offline experiments and analyze results. Comfortable with metrics such as precision/recall, AUC, or other evaluation techniques to judge performance without always needing an online experiment
Benefits
Eligible for a new hire equity grant
Annual refresh grants
Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits
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
2026-01-09
Company data provided by crunchbase