Canada onlyWe'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
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. 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.
United States
