[Hiring] Senior Software Engineer II, AI Labs & Foundations @Instacart

Role Description

Join Instacart's mission to transform grocery shopping through frontier AI. As a Senior Software Engineer on AI Labs & Foundations, you will design, build, and operate the high-scale production systems that power our most ambitious AI experiences—from Cart Assistant, our conversational shopping agent, to voice AI interactions and beyond. This is a high-impact opportunity to work at the intersection of robust software engineering and cutting-edge production AI/ML, directly shaping products used by millions of customers every day.

About the Role

• Participate in the design and delivery of production AI systems.
• Identify high-leverage technical opportunities.
• Contribute hands-on to AI-native products across Instacart's platform.
• Value bottom-up ideas, high engineering quality, and close partnership with Product, Data Science, ML, and Infrastructure teams.
• Enjoy inventing, navigating ambiguity, prototyping fast, and turning wild ideas into real, scalable products.

About the Team

• AI Labs & Foundations sits at the intersection of frontier AI research and production engineering.
• Portfolio spans the full stack of AI innovation at Instacart, including building and launching Cart Assistant and pioneering voice AI interactions.
• Fast-moving, collaborative team that thrives on 0-to-1 thinking.
• Shares learnings openly and ships with urgency by prototyping fast and testing rigorously.

About the Job

• Design, build, and operate production AI-powered systems and agentic experiences (including Cart Assistant and voice AI).
• Build foundational systems for cutting-edge AI experiences, ranging from embedding infrastructure and voice AI pipelines to client-facing components and integrations.
• Integrate foundation models via APIs and open-source frameworks; apply techniques like retrieval-augmented generation and vector search where appropriate.
• Own projects end-to-end: requirements, technical design, implementation, testing, deployment, observability, and iterative improvement focused on reliability, latency, and cost efficiency.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners in product, design, data science, and infrastructure to ship AI features end-to-end.
• Drive engineering excellence, including thoughtful system design, rigorous code review, and technical leadership that includes defining and promoting best practices for AI/ML production engineering across the team.

Qualifications

• Proven senior software engineer who has built, shipped, and operated production systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience with AI or ML in production.
• Experience owning services end-to-end, including CI/CD, automated testing, observability (logging, metrics, tracing), and on-call participation.
• Strong communicator who partners well across disciplines.
• Excitement and ability to leverage cutting-edge development tools, including AI assistance (e.g., Copilot, Cursor, Claude).

Preferred Qualifications

• 5 to 8+ years of industry experience.
• A track record of 0-to-1 work taking unconventional ideas from prototype through rapid iteration to production.
• Experience building conversational agents, multi-turn dialogue systems, or agentic LLM applications.
• Experience with STT/TTS or natural language interfaces, LLM fine-tuning, ML transfer learning, model training, and the vocabulary of measurement of model performance.
• Experience with embedding systems, vector search, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, or Elasticsearch).
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP), containers (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Experience with event-driven or distributed systems (e.g., Kafka).
• Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership within cross-functional teams.

Benefits

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