Instacart

Senior Software Engineer II, AI Labs & Foundations

United States - Remote · Senior

Sponsorship not specified$230k-$242kDetected 28 days ago

Distributed SystemsFull-Stack DevelopmentCode ReviewElasticsearchVector DatabasesAWSGCPCloud PlatformsDockerKubernetesCI/CDKafkaMachine LearningData ScienceLLMsRAGRecruitingTest AutomationResearchLeadershipMentoring

About the role

Join Instacart's mission to transform grocery shopping through frontier AI.
This is a high-impact opportunity to work at the intersection of robust software engineering and cutting-edge production AI/ML, directly shaping products used by millions of customers every day.
We value bottom-up ideas, high engineering quality, and close partnership with Product, Data Science, ML, and Infrastructure teams.

Responsibilities

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.
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.
Own projects end-to-end: requirements, technical design, implementation, testing, deployment, observability, and iterative improvement focused on reliability, latency, and cost efficiency.

Requirements

Proven senior software engineer who has built, shipped, and operated production systems at scale.
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.
Excitement and ability to leverage cutting-edge development tools, including AI assistance (e.g., Copilot, Cursor, Claude), to maximize velocity.

Nice to have

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 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.
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.

Company info

We are a fast-moving, collaborative team that thrives on 0-to-1 thinking, shares learnings openly, and ships with urgency by prototyping fast and testing rigorously.
We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer who will participate in the design and delivery of production AI systems, identify high-leverage technical opportunities, and contribute hands-on to AI-native products across Instacart's platform.
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.

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