Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Search and Recommendations

July 23

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Instacart

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eCommerce • Transport • Retail

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.

1001 - 5000 employees

Founded 2012

🛍️ eCommerce

🚗 Transport

🛒 Retail

💰 $232M Venture Round on 2021-11

📋 Description

• Architect and scale foundational LLM systems that unify query understanding, personalization, ranking, ads, and merchandising—replacing dozens of siloed models with a single, adaptive backbone. • Develop agentic workflows that proactively support shoppers by generating personalized cart starters, thematic bundles, and dynamic storefronts—driven by LLMs reasoning over historical behavior, preferences, and context. • Fine-tune large language models using SFT, DPO, and GRPO on rich behavioral feedback signals to align system outputs with evolving customer needs and business objectives. • Design intelligent, end-to-end discovery pipelines that handle everything from long-tail semantic retrieval to real-time multi-objective ranking and merchandising optimization. • Collaborate cross-functionally with product, design, infra, and ads teams to translate high-level discovery goals into scalable LLM-powered systems that drive measurable impact. • Coach and mentor a team of ML engineers, fostering their technical and professional growth.

🎯 Requirements

• Have 5+ years of industry experience using machine learning to solve real-world problems with large datasets with 3+ years in a technical leadership role • Proven track record designing and deploying sophisticated ML/AI systems in production environments that drive measurable business impact through improved recommendations, search relevance, and user engagement metrics. • Have strong programming skills in Python and fluency in data manipulation (SQL, Pandas) and Machine Learning (scikit-learn, XGBoost, Keras/Tensorflow) tools • Have strong analytical skills and problem-solving ability • Are a strong communicator who can collaborate with diverse stakeholders across all levels. • Extensive expertise with modern deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX) and advanced LLM architectures including transformer models, attention mechanisms, and multimodal AI systems. • Demonstrated experience implementing and fine-tuning large language models, including prompt engineering, embedding techniques, and efficient inference optimization for production environments. • Strong foundation in AI fundamentals including neural network architectures, generative models, and foundation model adaptation methodologies like PEFT, LoRA, and RLHF. • Experience optimizing AI model performance across the full stack, from model architecture and training workflows to distributed inference and serving infrastructure. • Self-motivated innovator with a strong sense of ownership who can navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape, evaluate emerging techniques, and implement novel approaches to solve complex business challenges. • Passion for applying cutting-edge AI research to real-world applications and a keen understanding of the practical considerations in developing responsible, efficient AI systems at scale.

🏖️ Benefits

• 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. • 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.