Senior Data Scientist (I & II)

We're transforming the grocery industry At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers. Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table. Instacart is a Flex First team There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work. OVERVIEW ABOUT THE ROLE We are currently seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Agentic Analytics Platform team — the team responsible for the AI-for-Data charter inside Instacart's Data Infrastructure org. You'll design and build LLM-powered systems that transform how data practitioners (data scientists, data engineers, analysts, PMs) interact with data at Instacart — from natural-language data access and AI-assisted SQL, to automated metadata generation, to embedding intelligent capabilities across our broader data infra ecosystem. This is a hands-on role at the frontier of applied AI inside a large, modern data stack. ABOUT THE TEAM The mission of the Instacart Self-Serve organization is to improve the productivity of data practitioners through easy-to-use, self-serve tools. Agentic Analytics is the team chartered with bringing AI and LLMs into that mission — broadly. We own the systems, evals, and product surfaces that make AI-for-Data real at Instacart, and we partner across Data Infra to embed AI capabilities wherever they create the most leverage. It's a small team with an outsized charter, defining what "AI for the data org" looks like in production at company scale. ABOUT THE JOB * You will be part of a small, ambitious team with a large amount of ownership and surface area, contributing directly to the AI-for-Data charter at Instacart. * You will build LLM-powered systems end-to-end — retrieval/grounding over internal metadata and code, agentic workflows, evals and quality systems, and the product surfaces that put these tools in front of internal users. * You will have the opportunity to suggest and drive new initiatives — the roadmap is still being shaped and there's real room for contribution. * You will collaborate closely with other engineers on the team and contribute to a strong engineering culture around applied AI rigor (evals, observability, safety, cost). * You will work closely with Data Science, ML, Product Engineering, and other Data Infra teams to identify high-leverage AI applications and translate them into reliable, production-grade systems. ABOUT YOU MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS * Self-motivation and an enjoyment for a startup environment, with comfort operating in ambiguity * A strong sense of ownership and a builder's instinct — you've shipped real systems, not just prototypes * Strong backend engineering skills in Python, with experience building production services * Hands-on experience with applied LLM systems — RAG, agentic workflows, prompt engineering, evals, or similar. You've worked on an LLM-powered system in production (or close to it) and have opinions on what makes them reliable. * Working knowledge of common data infrastructure technologies (Python, Airflow, Snowflake, dbt) in a production environment * Strong knowledge of SQL * Experience working with a large codebase on a cross-functional team * An ability to balance a sense of urgency with shipping high quality and pragmatic solutions * 5+ years of working experience in a similar field/environment PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Experience with retrieval systems, vector stores, or grounding LLMs over structured/unstructured enterprise data * Familiarity with eval frameworks and quality systems for LLM-powered products * Experience building developer tools or internal tools for technical users * Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, OR equivalent work experience #LI-Remote 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. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here. Currently, we are only hiring in the following provinces: Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. 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. For Canadian based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below. CAN $168,000—$177,500 USD

We're transforming the grocery industry At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers. Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table. Instacart is a Flex First team There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work. OVERVIEW Instacart’s Shopping Experience team is focused on making it fast and effortless for customers to find the right items within a single retailer and complete their order with confidence. As a Senior Data Scientist dedicated to Search, you’ll own the analytics and experimentation strategy that powers how we interpret customer intent and connect it to the most relevant items and retailers. In this role, you’ll partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Machine Learning to shape the roadmap for search relevance, ranking quality, and latency. Your work will translate complex, noisy signals into clear insights and recommendations that move the metrics that matter—search conversion, order rate, and GTV—while also strengthening downstream experiences like ads and retailer satisfaction.   ABOUT THE JOB * Own core Search metrics and funnels end to end (e.g., query → impression → engagement → cart adds), including defining guardrails, monitoring performance across platforms and segments, and diagnosing conversion gaps. * Design, run, and interpret experiments across ranking, retrieval, and search UX (e.g., relevance model changes, query understanding, result layouts), turning ambiguous or conflicting outcomes into crisp, data-driven recommendations. * Partner with Product, Engineering, and ML to prioritize opportunities, size impact, and influence the roadmap for relevance, quality, and latency improvements that unlock measurable business outcomes. * Build deep diagnostic analyses by query class, price point, surface, and customer lifecycle to pinpoint where and why Search underperforms and specify concrete changes that will move key outcomes. * Connect offline model evaluation with online and business metrics by collaborating with ML partners on evaluation design, ensuring model changes reliably improve end-user experience—not just offline scores. * Improve data quality, instrumentation, and metric definitions for Search so that teams can reason about performance with clarity, consistency, and speed.   ABOUT YOU You combine rigorous analytics, strong product sense, and clear communication to drive decisive action in a fast-paced environment. You enjoy rolling up your sleeves, collaborating across disciplines, and using experimentation to uncover what truly helps customers find the right items quickly.   MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS * 5+ years of experience in data science or product analytics, with a track record of impact on consumer-facing products. * Advanced SQL proficiency, including complex joins and window functions, working with large-scale datasets in modern data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift). * Proficiency in Python or R for analysis, experimentation, and modeling. * Hands-on experience designing and analyzing A/B tests end to end, including metric selection, power and sample sizing, covariate adjustment, and decision-making under uncertainty. * Demonstrated ability to define success metrics, decompose ambiguous product problems, and deliver clear, opinionated recommendations to Product and Engineering partners. * Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to tailor complex analyses for both technical and non-technical audiences. * Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative field (e.g., Statistics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Economics, Engineering) or equivalent practical experience. * Comfort using modern AI tooling (e.g., Claude, code assistants, PromptQL) to accelerate analysis, experimentation, and communication while exercising strong judgment on quality and reliability.   PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Experience in search relevance, ranking, recommendations, personalization, or information retrieval (e.g., e-commerce or marketplace search). * Familiarity with NLP, embeddings, and semantic search, including how to evaluate and iterate on these techniques in production. * Experience bridging offline evaluation metrics (e.g., NDCG, precision/recall, human evaluation) with online experiments and business outcomes. * Background in causal inference beyond standard A/B tests (e.g., holdouts, diff-in-diff, quasi-experiments) to measure long-term or cross-surface effects. * Comfort working across web and native app surfaces, navigating tradeoffs between relevance, monetization, and latency. * Proven impact improving logging, instrumentation, and metric definitions in complex data environments.   #LI-Remote 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. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here. Currently, we are only hiring in the following provinces: Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. 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. For Canadian based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below. CAN $161,000—$170,000 CAD