Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Recommendations

🕒 June 10

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Instacart

WebsiteLinkedInAll Job Openings

1001 - 5000 employees

Founded 2012

🍽️ Food & Beverage

📦 Logistics

🛍️ eCommerce

💰 $232M Venture Round on 2021-11

Food & Beverage • Logistics • eCommerce

Instacart is a company that offers a flexible approach to work while transforming the grocery industry. It provides an essential service by delivering groceries and household goods to customers' doors in as little as 30 minutes. Instacart offers safe and flexible earning opportunities to personal shoppers and tackles challenges such as rerouting deliveries during snowstorms and connecting customers with coupons and deals. It aims to be the operating system for the grocery industry, thus helping customers save time for other activities. Instacart emphasizes diversity, equity, and belonging in its work culture.

📋 Description

• Architect the ranking backbone that unifies query understanding, personalization, multi-objective ranking, ads, and merchandising into a single adaptive platform. • Design and build a search autosuggest system optimized for personalization and value-based relevance. • Design long-horizon objective functions (e.g., incrementality, LTV, habit formation) and build uplift/causal value models that move beyond short-term engagement. • Develop production-grade Multi-Task Learning (e.g., shared encoders, MMOE/PLE task heads) to jointly learn relevance, propensity, margin, and churn risk—ensuring calibration, constraints, and explainability. • Own the inference layer: goal-aware re-rankers, diversity and quality constraints, safe exploration, and millisecond-class latency optimization. • Advance evaluation practices: online experiments, long-horizon cohort metrics, counterfactual evaluations, and attribution pipelines for tracking incremental GTV and retention. • Partner across ads, infrastructure, product, and design teams to translate business goals into ranking policies and measurable ROI. • Mentor ML engineers to build expertise in ranking, causal inference, and scalable serving systems.

🎯 Requirements

• 4+ years applying ML at scale with a Master’s degree, or 2+ years for PhD, with a proven track record improving ranking or recommendation systems in production. • Demonstrated success in applying multi-objective or constrained optimization to balance relevance, revenue, margin, and user experience; experience with online testing and attribution beyond CTR. • Strong coding (Python) and data fluency (SQL/Pandas), with expertise in classic ML techniques (e.g., XGBoost) and deep learning frameworks (TensorFlow/PyTorch). • Excellent analytical skills and strong cross-functional communication abilities.

🏖️ Benefits

• Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. • This role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.