Senior Data Scientist (I & II)

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 This role challenges traditional approaches to digital shopping by improving backend systems that power a seamless user journey. You will lead efforts to enhance content discoverability and purchase processes, helping to perfect the interaction between user desires and our vast product offerings. The Senior Software Engineer will focus on enhancing the user experience by developing robust backend architectures that support advanced recommendation and personalization systems. In close collaboration with ML engineers, product teams, and data scientists, you will lead the innovation of our backend services, enabling sophisticated, data-driven features that adapt to our customers' shopping behaviors. The Core Experience teams are dedicated to creating engaging and straightforward shopping experiences. You will be part of a team that is at the heart of product innovation, focusing on everything from the user interfaces to the underlying systems that support our web and mobile platforms. Our team’s work is guided by a data-driven methodology that ensures decisions are aligned with consumer needs, helping us move swiftly and efficiently in our development processes. The Order Quality Team at Instacart is dedicated to delivering a seamless and dependable online grocery experience by ensuring every order is picked and delivered with the highest level of accuracy and care. We are responsible for the end to end post-checkout journey, which includes building intelligent replacement algorithms, providing real-time order status updates, and managing communication channels through SMS, push notifications, and live activity tracking. Our team also oversees features such as item summary pages, chat, cancellations and rescheduling, post-checkout pickup experience, and post order feedback, always striving to recover gracefully when things don’t go as planned. The Order Quality Team plays a vital role in creating transparency and control for customers, embodying Instacart’s commitment to operational excellence and innovation at scale. ABOUT THE JOB * Design, build, and maintain high-quality backend applications. * Lead the development of our backend system's roadmap, prioritizing scalability and reliability. * Innovate and think creatively to develop new features that enhance our customer's shopping experiences. * Own and lead major components of our product, ensuring they meet both internal standards and external expectations. * Collaborate across teams to foster a unified approach to product development, facilitating consensus and driving effective outcomes. * Responsible for the strategic planning and execution of projects you oversee, from inception to deployment and maintenance. ABOUT YOU Minimum Qualifications * 5+ years of backend development experience, with a strong record of project delivery. * Proficiency in backend languages, such as Ruby or Go. * A solid foundation in unit testing and problem-solving. * Exceptional communication skills and the ability to lead and collaborate with diverse teams. * Holds a Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience. Preferred Qualifications * Experience with recommender systems and personalization algorithms. * Familiarity with ML model development and iteration. * Deep understanding of feed architecture principles. * Skilled in the use of monitoring and observability tools like Datadog. * Extensive experience with database management, particularly PostgreSQL. #LI-Remote 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. CA, NY, CT, NJ $230,000—$242,000 USD WA $220,000—$232,000 USD OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI $211,000—$222,000 USD All other states $192,000—$202,000 USD

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’s Shopping Experience team is focused on making it fast and effortless for customers to find the right items within a single retailer and complete their order with confidence. As a Senior Data Scientist dedicated to Search, you’ll own the analytics and experimentation strategy that powers how we interpret customer intent and connect it to the most relevant items and retailers. In this role, you’ll partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Machine Learning to shape the roadmap for search relevance, ranking quality, and latency. Your work will translate complex, noisy signals into clear insights and recommendations that move the metrics that matter—search conversion, order rate, and GTV—while also strengthening downstream experiences like ads and retailer satisfaction.   ABOUT THE JOB * Own core Search metrics and funnels end to end (e.g., query → impression → engagement → cart adds), including defining guardrails, monitoring performance across platforms and segments, and diagnosing conversion gaps. * Design, run, and interpret experiments across ranking, retrieval, and search UX (e.g., relevance model changes, query understanding, result layouts), turning ambiguous or conflicting outcomes into crisp, data-driven recommendations. * Partner with Product, Engineering, and ML to prioritize opportunities, size impact, and influence the roadmap for relevance, quality, and latency improvements that unlock measurable business outcomes. * Build deep diagnostic analyses by query class, price point, surface, and customer lifecycle to pinpoint where and why Search underperforms and specify concrete changes that will move key outcomes. * Connect offline model evaluation with online and business metrics by collaborating with ML partners on evaluation design, ensuring model changes reliably improve end-user experience—not just offline scores. * Improve data quality, instrumentation, and metric definitions for Search so that teams can reason about performance with clarity, consistency, and speed.   ABOUT YOU You combine rigorous analytics, strong product sense, and clear communication to drive decisive action in a fast-paced environment. You enjoy rolling up your sleeves, collaborating across disciplines, and using experimentation to uncover what truly helps customers find the right items quickly.   MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS * 5+ years of experience in data science or product analytics, with a track record of impact on consumer-facing products. * Advanced SQL proficiency, including complex joins and window functions, working with large-scale datasets in modern data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift). * Proficiency in Python or R for analysis, experimentation, and modeling. * Hands-on experience designing and analyzing A/B tests end to end, including metric selection, power and sample sizing, covariate adjustment, and decision-making under uncertainty. * Demonstrated ability to define success metrics, decompose ambiguous product problems, and deliver clear, opinionated recommendations to Product and Engineering partners. * Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to tailor complex analyses for both technical and non-technical audiences. * Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative field (e.g., Statistics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Economics, Engineering) or equivalent practical experience. * Comfort using modern AI tooling (e.g., Claude, code assistants, PromptQL) to accelerate analysis, experimentation, and communication while exercising strong judgment on quality and reliability.   PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Experience in search relevance, ranking, recommendations, personalization, or information retrieval (e.g., e-commerce or marketplace search). * Familiarity with NLP, embeddings, and semantic search, including how to evaluate and iterate on these techniques in production. * Experience bridging offline evaluation metrics (e.g., NDCG, precision/recall, human evaluation) with online experiments and business outcomes. * Background in causal inference beyond standard A/B tests (e.g., holdouts, diff-in-diff, quasi-experiments) to measure long-term or cross-surface effects. * Comfort working across web and native app surfaces, navigating tradeoffs between relevance, monetization, and latency. * Proven impact improving logging, instrumentation, and metric definitions in complex data environments.   #LI-Remote 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. CA, NY, CT, NJ $194,000—$204,500 USD WA $185,000—$195,500 USD OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI $177,000—$187,000 USD All other states $161,000—$170,000 USD