The opportunity
Instacart’s AI Productivity team builds AI-powered platforms and tools that help our engineers and operators move faster, reduce toil, and deliver higher-quality experiences for customers, shoppers, retailers, and brand partners.
What you'll do
Design, build, and operate AI-powered services and internal applications—such: as code and test assistants, knowledge search, and intelligent chat workflows—that improve developer and operator productivity at scale.
Implement robust back-end services in languages such as Python, Go, or Java;: integrate foundation models via APIs and open-source frameworks; and apply techniques like retrieval-augmented generation and vector search where appropriate.
Own projects end-to-end, including requirements, technical design,: implementation, testing, deployment, observability, on-call participation, and iterative improvements focused on reliability, latency, and cost efficiency.
Partner with Developer Platform, ML Platform, Security, and Legal to ensure: safe and compliant AI usage, including data governance, guardrails, content/prompt safety, and privacy-by-design.
Define and track success with clear metrics (e.g., adoption, task completion: time, DORA/SPACE signals, satisfaction), and run experiments and A/B tests to validate impact and guide iteration.
Create and maintain shared tooling, libraries, and documentation that raise: the bar for applied AI development across Instacart, and mentor teammates on best practices in this fast-paced, evolving space.
What they're looking for
- Experience adapting or fine-tuning foundation models and implementing: retrieval-augmented generation with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, or Elasticsearch with vector search).
- Track record of building internal developer tools or platforms adopted by 100+ engineers.
- Experience measuring developer productivity (e.g., DORA/SPACE), instrumenting: product analytics, and running A/B or multivariate experiments.
- Knowledge of AI safety, privacy, and compliance practices (e.g., PII: redaction, guardrails, model/content moderation, data residency considerations).
- Experience with event-driven systems and microservices (e.g., Kafka, Pub/Sub): and designing resilient distributed systems.
- Ability to build lightweight front-ends for internal tools (e.g., React,: TypeScript) to accelerate adoption and feedback loops.
- Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership within cross-functional teams.
