[Hiring] Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Economist @Instacart

Role Description

As a machine learning engineer in the Economics team, you will build state-of-the-art systems that blend rigorous economic thought with sophisticated machine learning algorithms to tackle some of the company's most challenging problems. Working in a horizontal team, you will have the opportunity to collaborate closely with partners across multiple functions to operate on a highly diverse set of problems, contributing both economic and engineering expertise in a fast-paced environment filled with exciting opportunities for technically-minded economists.

The Economics team at Instacart works on a range of interesting and challenging problems across our platform, including:

• Aligning the incentives in our multi-sided marketplace
• Analyzing the role of prices and product placement in our customers' decision-making
• Matching and logistics
• Online advertising
• Uplift and long-term value modeling
• General causal inference

Check out this blog post to learn more.

Qualifications

• Graduate Degree (Masters or PhD) in Economics or a closely related field
• A blend of economic theory, applied econometrics, and business skills
• Experience applying causal inference methodologies to both observational and experimental datasets
• An understanding of machine learning algorithms and techniques
• Strong programming skills (Python) and fluency in data manipulation (SQL, Pandas) and machine learning tools (e.g., scikit-learn, XGBoost)
• Excellent communication skills (both verbal and written)
• Self-motivation and a strong sense of ownership

Requirements

• For Senior Machine Learning Engineer I, Economist hires, we also expect:
• 1-3 years of industry experience in a similar position
• Experience putting machine learning models into production environments
• Experience with cloud computing and related ML infrastructure

Preferred Qualifications

• A PhD in Economics or a closely related field with a focus on data-intense problems
• Intern experience in related roles
• Experience with large language models and generative AI, both on the algorithm side as well as a day-to-day tool
• Experience with uplift modeling, contextual bandits, and/or heterogeneous treatment effect estimation

Benefits

• Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits
• Remote work flexibility
• New hire equity grant and annual refresh grants