Senior Software Engineer II, AI Labs & Foundations

Instacart is transforming grocery shopping by helping people access the food and household goods they need while creating flexible earning opportunities for personal shoppers. The Senior Software Engineer will design, build, and operate scalable production AI systems and agentic experiences, including Cart Assistant and voice AI, while collaborating across product, data science, ML, and infrastructure teams. The role also owns projects end-to-end and drives engineering excellence for AI/ML production systems.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate production AI-powered systems and agentic experiences (including Cart Assistant and voice AI) that directly impact how millions of customers shop
• Build foundational systems for cutting-edge AI experiences, ranging from embedding infrastructure and voice AI pipelines, to client facing components and integrations, by prototyping bold ideas and productizing what works
• Integrate foundation models via APIs and open-source frameworks; apply techniques like retrieval-augmented generation and vector search where appropriate
• Own projects end-to-end: requirements, technical design, implementation, testing, deployment, observability, and iterative improvement focused on reliability, latency, and cost efficiency
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners in product, design, data science, and infrastructure to ship AI features end-to-end
• Drive engineering excellence, including thoughtful system design, rigorous code review, and technical leadership that includes defining and promoting best practices for AI/ML production engineering across the team

Requirements:

• Proven senior software engineer who has built, shipped, and operated production systems at scale. You make architectural calls, own what you build, and deliver through ambiguity
• Hands-on experience with AI or ML in production. You've shipped LLM-powered features or integrated foundation model APIs into a live product, demonstrating the necessary expertise at the intersection of robust software engineering and deep production ML
• Experience owning services end-to-end, including CI/CD, automated testing, observability (logging, metrics, tracing), and on-call participation
• Strong communicator who partners well across disciplines - you want to get to the right answer, not just defend the first one
• Golang, Python, or Typescript language experience
• Excitement and ability to leverage cutting-edge development tools, including AI assistance (e.g., Copilot, Cursor, Claude), to maximize velocity
• 5 to 8+ years of industry experience
• A track record of 0-to-1 work taking unconventional ideas from prototype through rapid iteration to production
• Experience building conversational agents, multi-turn dialogue systems, or agentic LLM applications
• Experience with STT/TTS or natural language interfaces, LLM fine tuning, ML transfer learning, model training and the vocabulary of measurement of model performance
• Experience with embedding systems, vector search, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, or Elasticsearch)
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP), containers (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Experience with event-driven or distributed systems (e.g., Kafka)
• Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership within cross-functional teams