Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Summary

Join Instacart's Ads Quality team as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer and build cutting-edge systems to optimize ad performance. You will collaborate with a cross-functional team, leveraging Instacart's unique data to create value for advertising partners and enhance consumer experience. This role involves designing, developing, and deploying machine learning solutions, collaborating with stakeholders, and mentoring junior engineers. The ideal candidate possesses a graduate degree in a relevant field, strong programming and analytical skills, and experience in delivering business results using machine learning. Instacart offers competitive compensation and benefits, including equity grants and a flexible remote work policy.

Requirements

• Have a graduate degree (masters or PhD) in artificial intelligence, machine learning, operations research or equivalent self study and experience
• A deep understanding of machine learning algorithms and techniques, with fluency in modern research and literature
• Strong programming skills in software engineering (e.g., Python, Go), along with expertise in data manipulation using tools (SQL, Spark, and Pandas), and ML frameworks (Torch, Tensorflow, XGBoost)
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Excellent communication skills (both verbal and written) and can collaborate with a diverse group of stakeholders across all levels
• Demonstrated experience in using advanced algorithms or machine learning to deliver material business results

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy machine learning solutions to tackle practical challenges in our complex marketplace while advancing the training and serving infrastructure
• Collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, and other engineers to deeply understand business needs and create impactful ML applications
• Actively engage with diverse stakeholders to ensure that solutions are well-integrated and aligned with business goals
• Push the envelope on our operational efficiency by continually refining and advancing our algorithms and models
• Mentor junior engineers, set technical direction, and conduct thorough code reviews to ensure high code quality and maintainability. Lead by example in fostering a culture of continuous improvement and technical excellence

Preferred Qualifications

• Have 5+ years of industry experience using machine learning to solve real-world problems with large datasets
• Experience in digital advertising platforms
• Experience with sequential modeling, transformer architecture, and generative retrieval or building large scale online recommendation systems
• Familiarity with LLM integrations, prompt engineering, and productivity tooling
• Demonstrated experience in solving complex model training and serving efficiency challenges, including optimizing training pipelines, reducing model training times, and improving serving architectures to enhance operational efficiency and scalability

Benefits

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