Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Discovery

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by powering millions of shopping journeys daily through advanced machine learning technologies. They are seeking a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to define the technical vision and lead the development of innovative AI systems that enhance customer experiences in shopping and discovery.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the long term technical vision for Shopping ML across search, discovery, recommendations, and personalization
• Lead development of AI systems that fundamentally improve how customers discover products and shop on Instacart
• Architect large scale ML systems combining LLM reasoning, retrieval, ranking, recommendation models, and personalization
• Build and operate production ML systems powering real time shopping experiences across millions of users and products
• Identify foundational ML capabilities that unlock new customer experiences and accelerate experimentation across the organization
• Partner with senior leaders across product, engineering, and data science to shape technical strategy and roadmap
• Influence company wide ML architecture and contribute to major technical initiatives across Instacart
• Mentor senior/staff engineers through design reviews, architecture guidance, and hands-on collaboration

Requirements:

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or related field, or equivalent industry experience
• 10+ years building and operating large scale machine learning systems in production
• Proven track record architecting ML systems that power core product experiences at global scale
• Deep expertise in areas such as recommendation systems, ranking models, embeddings, representation learning, or search systems
• Experience combining generative AI with traditional ML systems such as retrieval, ranking, and personalization
• Experience designing ML platforms that support large scale experimentation, training, and deployment
• Ability to influence senior engineering and product leaders and drive technical strategy
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar across teams
• Experience building search, discovery, or recommendation systems for large consumer platforms
• Expertise in large language models, agentic AI systems, or tool using AI architectures
• Experience fine tuning and distilling LLMs for low latency production systems, balancing model quality, latency, and cost
• Experience building ML infrastructure supporting large scale experimentation and model deployment
• Background working on e-commerce, marketplaces, or large consumer platforms
• Recognized technical leadership through publications, patents, conference talks, or open source contributions