Instacart
Machine Learning Engineer II - Ads Response Prediction
Job Summary
This role involves designing, developing, and deploying machine learning solutions for Instacart's ad systems, focusing on areas such as ad selection, ranking, auction, and pricing across consumer-facing interfaces. The candidate will collaborate with product managers, data scientists, and engineers to create impactful ML applications aligned with business needs. Key responsibilities include working on data pipelines, model architectures, and operational efficiency enhancements, while engaging in all stages from concept to implementation. The position requires strong programming skills, experience with recommendation systems, and familiarity with modern deep learning and modeling techniques.
Required Skills
Benefits
Job Description
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:
As a Machine Learning Engineer, you will have the opportunity to collaborate closely with senior engineers and product leaders as part of your team. Together, you'll develop and enhance Instacart's ads systems. You will use machine learning to devise and refine solutions in crucial areas such as ads selection, ranking, auction, and pricing across all of Instacart’s consumer facing pages like Search, storefront, aisle, pre and post checkout experiences, among many others. You will actively contribute to initiatives, assisting in all stages from the initial concept, through prototyping and experimentation, to final implementation.
About the Team:
The Ads Response Prediction team owns all systems, algorithms and ML models to ensure a relevant and engaging Ads experience to customers of all the platforms powered by Instacart. This includes search and exploration retrieval systems, sequential modeling and generative retrieval systems for next interaction recommendations, LLM integrations, relevance models, pCTR models, bidding models and incrementality models. The team optimizes for an efficient marketplace to ensure customers see ads that help them try new products/brands, advertisers boost their product sales for a good return on investment, and instacart generates the deserving revenue as well.
About the Job:
- Design, develop, and deploy machine learning solutions including data pipelines, model architectures and serving integrations to tackle practical challenges in the ads organization.
- Collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, and infrastructure 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.
About You:
Minimum Qualifications:
- Have a graduate degree (masters or PhD) in artificial intelligence, machine learning, recommendation systems or equivalent self study and experience
- Have strong programming skills in Python and fluency in data manipulation (SQL, Spark, Pandas) and Machine Learning (scikit-learn, XGBoost) and Deep Learning (Torch, Keras/Tensorflow) tools. Acquaintance or willing to learn GoLang.
- Have strong analytical skills and problem-solving ability
- Are a strong communicator who can collaborate with diverse stakeholders across all levels
Preferred Qualifications:
- Have 1-2 years of industry experience using machine learning to solve real-world problems with large datasets
- Knowledge of sequential modeling, Transformer architecture and generative retrieval
- Familiarity with LLM integrations, prompt engineering and productivity tooling
- Experience in building large scale online recommendation systems
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.
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 US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.
Instacart
A grocery delivery service allowing users to order from local stores and have items delivered by personal shoppers.
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