Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Discovery

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 Instacart powers millions of shopping journeys every day across one of the largest online grocery catalogs in the world. Machine learning sits at the center of that experience, shaping how customers search, discover, and decide what to buy. Advances in generative AI create a rare opportunity to rethink how commerce works. Instead of traditional ranking pipelines alone, the next generation of shopping experiences will be powered by intelligent systems that help customers explore products, plan purchases, and discover what they need more naturally. We are looking for a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to help lead this transformation. In this role, you will define the technical vision for how machine learning powers the Instacart shopping journey and build systems that move beyond traditional search and recommendation approaches. You will help develop next generation shopping experiences using large language models, agentic AI systems, and large scale personalization. This is a hands-on IC and technical leadership role at the Director level with no people management responsibilities. You will shape long term technical direction while building production systems that serve millions of customers in real time. About the Job Define and drive the long term technical vision for Shopping ML across search, discovery, recommendations, and personalization. Lead development of AI syste

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