The opportunity
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.
What you'll do
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.
Value-Aware Optimization: Uplift and long-horizon value models that steer decisions toward incrementality and LTV, with calibrated constraints on quality, diversity, fairness, and spend pacing—plus guardrails for safe exploration.
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.
Architect the ranking backbone that unifies query understanding,: personalization, multi-objective ranking, ads, and merchandising into a single adaptive platform.
Design and build a search autosuggest system optimized for personalization and value-based relevance.
Design long-horizon objective functions (e.g., incrementality, LTV, habit: formation) and build uplift/causal value models that move beyond short-term engagement.
What they're looking for
- Develop production-grade Multi-Task Learning (e.g., shared encoders, MMOE/PLE: task heads) to jointly learn relevance, propensity, margin, and churn risk—ensuring calibration, constraints, and explainability.
- Own the inference layer: goal-aware re-rankers, diversity and quality constraints, safe exploration, and millisecond-class latency optimization.
- Advance evaluation practices: online experiments, long-horizon cohort metrics, counterfactual evaluations, and attribution pipelines for tracking incremental GTV and retention.
- Partner across ads, infrastructure, product, and design teams to translate: business goals into ranking policies and measurable ROI.
