Machine Learning Engineer II - Core Experience

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.

Overview

Join Instacart’s mission to revolutionize the grocery industry through cutting-edge technologies. As a Machine Learning Engineer focused on Core Experience, you will help create seamless shopping experiences by leveraging advanced machine learning techniques to improve search relevance and discovery on Instacart's platform. This is an exciting opportunity to work on meaningful challenges at the intersection of AI and e-commerce, directly impacting how millions of users interact with the platform daily.

About the Role

We are seeking a highly motivated Machine Learning Engineer to join our Core Experience team. In this role, you’ll work alongside world-class engineers, data scientists, and product managers to shape the future of search technology at Instacart. You will collaborate on building models that enhance search relevance, ranking, and personalization, delivering highly relevant results to users across the Instacart ecosystem. This is a role where your contributions will not only drive immediate impact but also present exciting opportunities to showcase your work through publications and conferences (recent publications 1, 2, 3).

About the Team

The Core Experience ML team at Instacart is at the forefront of applying cutting-edge AI technologies, including large language models (LLMs), to revolutionize how customers find products. Working alongside world-class engineers, data scientists, and product managers, we're building sophisticated machine learning and AI systems that power the future of search and recommendations at Instacart. Our team leverages state-of-the-art transformer architectures, multimodal AI, and generative models to enhance the relevance across all shopping surfaces. We're constantly innovating with advanced neural retrieval methods, LLM-powered ranking algorithms, and AI-driven personalization systems that deliver highly contextual and intuitive results to users throughout the Instacart ecosystem. As part of our team, you'll tackle one of the most critical aspects of the business—helping customers connect with exactly the right products through AI. We're solving complex, large-scale search challenges using the latest in deep learning, natural language understanding, and LLM fine-tuning techniques to create intelligent systems that truly understand user intent and shopping behavior. Our commitment to AI innovation is reflected in our recent publications and research contributions to the field.

About the Job

• Design, develop, and deploy advanced AI and machine learning solutions, including LLMs and neural networks, to solve complex challenges in our dynamic marketplace environment.
• Architect and implement state-of-the-art deep learning systems that leverage transformer models, multimodal AI, and generative techniques to create intelligent, adaptive solutions.
• Collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, and backend engineers to translate business requirements into cutting-edge AI applications that deliver measurable impact.
• Pioneer the application of foundation models, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning methodologies to create AI systems that understand context and user intent at unprecedented levels.
• Engage with diverse stakeholders to ensure our AI solutions are ethically implemented, well-integrated with existing systems, and fully aligned with strategic business objectives.
• Drive continuous innovation in our AI infrastructure by researching, testing, and implementing the latest advancements in machine learning, from embeddings and vector databases to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).
• Push the boundaries of operational efficiency through intelligent automation, predictive modeling, and algorithmic optimization powered by our custom-trained AI systems.

About You

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related fields
• Strong programming skills in Python and fluency in data manipulation (SQL, Spark, Pandas) and machine learning (Pytorch, Tensorflow) tools
• Strong analytical skills and problem-solving ability
• Strong communicator who can collaborate with diverse stakeholders across all levels

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 3+ years of experience building and deploying machine learning models in production environments
• PhD in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or related fields
• Previous experience working on search or recommendation systems at scale
• Strong publication track record in top-tier AI/ML conferences
• Familiarity with A/B testing and experimentation methodologies for search relevance improvement

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. 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.

For Canadian based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.