Machine Learning Engineer II

Machine Learning Engineer II - Ads Response Prediction

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.

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.

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.

For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.

CA, NY, CT, NJ

$179,000—$199,000 USD

WA

$172,000—$191,000 USD

OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI

$165,000—$183,000 USD

All other states

$149,000—$165,000 USD

Instacart is a hybrid remote team. Most of our roles are open to in-office, flex, or remote work

No matter what you bring to the potluck, there’s a seat at the table for you. We celebrate the unique and diverse paths, perspectives and experiences that you may bring to Instacart.

Equal Opportunity

Instacart is an equal opportunity employer. As we highly value diversity in our current and future employees, we do not discriminate (including in our hiring and promotion practices) on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, national origin, age, sex and gender, gender expression and gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, military and veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

For Colorado applicants, pursuant to the Colorado Job Application Fairness Act, you may omit or redact information identifying age, date of birth, and/or dates of attendance at or graduation from an educational institution in your resume and/or application.