Instacart

Senior Machine Learning Engineer II, Search & Recommendations Ranking

US - Remote · Senior

Sponsorship not specified$207k-$254kDetected 27 days ago

PythonSQLMachine LearningDeep LearningTensorFlowPyTorchPandasLLMsA/B TestingRecruitingResearchLeadershipCommunication

About the role

The Search & Personalization ML team is Instacart's engine for state-of-the-art multi-task, multi-objective ranking-unifying search, discovery, recommendation, ads, and merchandising into a single value-aware platform.
Foundational Ranking Backbone Models: Multi-task/multi-objective models (shared encoders + task heads) that jointly learn relevance, conversion, margin contribution, churn risk, and ad quality, enabling consistent decisions across search and recommendations.
LLM-Enhanced Retrieval & Features: Using LLMs to enrich query and item semantics for long-tail recall, generate features for cold-starts, and feed the ranker with reasoning-rich context, while remaining the source of truth for final ordering.

Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we're building the team to help push our shopping cart forward.
Partnering with world-class engineers, scientists, and PMs, we build the ranking backbone that powers every pixel of the shopping journey, optimizing not just for clicks, but for incremental GTV, basket lift, and retention over the long run.
What We're Building

5+ years applying ML at scale (3+ years in technical leadership), with a proven track record improving ranking or recommendation systems in production.
experience with online testing and attribution beyond CTR.

Hands-on experience with LLMs as feature/recall enhancers (e.g., embeddings, adapter tuning) while maintaining clarity on when the ranker should arbitrate.
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.
All other states

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

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.
Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.

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.
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.

This listing is sourced directly from Instacart's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.