Machine Learning Engineer

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. 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.

Instacart is a Flex First team. There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. 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.

• Design, develop, and deploy machine learning solutions to tackle the many economic challenges in our complex marketplace.
• Collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, and other engineers to deeply understand business needs and create impactful solutions.
• Push the envelope on our operational efficiency by continually refining and advancing our algorithms and models.
• Be an active member of the Economics team, sharing learnings, best practices, and research across domains while refining and advancing our algorithms.

• Graduate Degree (Masters or PhD) in Economics or a closely related field.
• A blend of economic theory, applied econometrics, and business skills that let you jump into a fast-paced environment and contribute from day one.
• Experience applying causal inference methodologies to both observational and experimental datasets.
• An understanding of machine learning algorithms and techniques.
• Strong programming skills (Python) and fluency in data manipulation (SQL, Pandas) and machine learning tools (e.g., scikit-learn, XGBoost).
• Excellent communication skills (both verbal and written).
• Self-motivation and a strong sense of ownership.
• For Senior Machine Learning Engineer I, Economist hires, we also expect:
• 1-3 years of industry experience in a similar position.
• Experience putting machine learning models into production environments.
• Experience with cloud computing and related ML infrastructure.
• Preferred Qualifications:
• A PhD in Economics or a closely related field with a focus on data-intense problems.
• Intern experience in related roles.
• Experience with large language models and generative AI, both on the algorithm side as well as a day-to-day tool.
• Experience with uplift modeling, contextual bandits, and/or heterogeneous treatment effect estimation.

• Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work.
• This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location.
• For Canadian based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below: CAN $180,000 — $190,000 CAD.
• Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.
• Flexible remote working environment.