Instacart

Instacart

Senior Machine Learning Engineer II, Ads Response Prediction

United States - Remote · Senior

Sponsorship not specified$240k-$254kDetected 27 days ago
PythonFull-Stack DevelopmentAlgorithmsSQLMachine LearningDeep LearningTensorFlowPyTorchPandasSparkdbtData EngineeringNLPLLMsMLOpsStatisticsRecruitingResearchCommunicationMentoring

About the role

  • This is a research-leaning role focused on theoretical problem formulation, training methodology, and model quality rather than infrastructure or full-stack engineering.
  • You will also have the opportunity to shape our next-generation foundation model approach for ads ranking and contribute to cutting-edge retrieval systems like TIGER (Transformer Index for Generative Recommenders), Semantic ID and domain language models.
  • 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.

Responsibilities

  • Lead research and development of pCTR and conversion prediction models, with a focus on improving calibration, reducing training data biases (selection bias, position bias, optimizer's curse), and advancing model accuracy across Instacart's ads surfaces.
  • Design and implement debiasing techniques such as Mixed Negative Sampling (MNS), Inverse Propensity Weighting (IPW), counterfactual risk minimization, and calibration methods (Platt scaling, isotonic regression) to address systematic prediction biases.
  • Collaborate with the broader ML community in the company on the path toward Foundation Models using autoregressive user behavior prediction.
  • Publish and present findings internally. Contribute to the team's culture of technical rigor through design reviews, paper sharing, and experiment retrospectives.
  • The team has strong ML infrastructure and MLOps support, including Delta/DBT-Spark data pipelines, Ray-based distributed training, and automated model deployment.

Requirements

  • 6+ years of combined academic and industry experience (including PhD research) applying ML to ranking, recommendation, or prediction problems at scale.
  • Ability to reason about selection bias, position bias, and propensity-based correction methods.
  • Track record of formulating ambiguous problems into well-scoped ML research directions and delivering results through rigorous experimentation.
  • Ability to explain complex modeling decisions to cross-functional stakeholders including product managers and data scientists.

Nice to have

  • Experience in ads ranking or auction-based systems (pCTR, bid optimization, ROAS feedback loops, marketplace dynamics).
  • Hands-on experience with autoregressive sequence models for user behavior prediction, generative retrieval, or transformer-based ranking architectures.
  • Familiarity with learned representations such as Semantic IDs, product embeddings, or other approaches to reducing feature cardinality and cold-start challenges.
  • Publication record in top-tier venues (KDD, WWW, RecSys, NeurIPS, ICML, SIGIR, or similar).
  • Experience mentoring junior engineers or shaping technical direction for a modeling team.
  • Familiarity with LLM-driven approaches to recommendation, including prompt-based personalization and AI-assisted model development (AutoML).
  • Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role.
  • For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.

Compensation

  • Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work.

Benefits

  • As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer II on the Ads Response Prediction team, you will lead the design and development of core ML models that power Instacart's ads ecosystem.

Company info

  • 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.
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