[Hiring] Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer @Instacart

Role Description

We are looking for a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to help lead the transformation of the grocery industry at Instacart. In this role, you will:

• Define and drive the long term technical vision for Shopping ML across search, discovery, recommendations, and personalization.
• Lead development of AI systems that fundamentally improve how customers discover products and shop on Instacart.
• Architect large scale ML systems combining LLM reasoning, retrieval, ranking, recommendation models, and personalization.
• Build and operate production ML systems powering real time shopping experiences across millions of users and products.
• Identify foundational ML capabilities that unlock new customer experiences and accelerate experimentation across the organization.
• Partner with senior leaders across product, engineering, and data science to shape technical strategy and roadmap.
• Influence company wide ML architecture and contribute to major technical initiatives across Instacart.
• Mentor senior/staff engineers through design reviews, architecture guidance, and hands-on collaboration.

Qualifications

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or related field, or equivalent industry experience.
• 10+ years building and operating large scale machine learning systems in production.
• Proven track record architecting ML systems that power core product experiences at global scale.
• Deep expertise in areas such as recommendation systems, ranking models, embeddings, representation learning, or search systems.
• Experience combining generative AI with traditional ML systems such as retrieval, ranking, and personalization.
• Experience designing ML platforms that support large scale experimentation, training, and deployment.
• Ability to influence senior engineering and product leaders and drive technical strategy.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar across teams.

Requirements

• Experience building search, discovery, or recommendation systems for large consumer platforms.
• Expertise in large language models, agentic AI systems, or tool using AI architectures.
• Experience fine tuning and distilling LLMs for low latency production systems, balancing model quality, latency, and cost.
• Experience building ML infrastructure supporting large scale experimentation and model deployment.
• Background working on e-commerce, marketplaces, or large consumer platforms.
• Recognized technical leadership through publications, patents, conference talks, or open source contributions.

Benefits

• Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits.
• Remote work flexibility under the Flex First remote work policy.
• Eligibility for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.