Senior Machine Learning Engineer II, Growth Modeling

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. 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 has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.

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

Overview

About the Role:

We are hiring a tech lead who will drive major initiatives, identify impactful opportunities, define roadmaps, mentor team members, and develop ML/AI solutions in the incentive space to drive substantial business growth.

We are the ML team within Instacart’s Growth org - a fast-moving, results-driven group building production-ready ML/AI systems to optimize incentive allocation. We tackle unique, high-impact problems, value bottom-up ideas, and partner closely with Product, Marketing, Data Science, and Backend Engineering to drive growth.

About the Job:

• Identifying high-leverage opportunities in incentive optimization, defining the technical roadmap, and driving end-to-end execution of ML/AI solutions to deliver measurable business impact.

• Partnering closely with product managers, marketers, data scientists, and backend engineers to deeply understand business needs and build impactful ML applications. 

• Leading and mentoring the team, raising technical standards, and improving team execution efficiency.

About You:

Minimum Qualifications:

• Proven track record of identifying high-impact opportunities, defining roadmaps, driving major initiatives, partnering with cross-functional stakeholders, and hands-on developing production-ready ML/AI solutions that deliver measurable business results.
• Strong skills in analytics, modeling, programming, and communication
• Strong ownership, results-driven, and continuously innovating to deliver impact.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in incentive or pricing optimization. 
• Experience in causal modeling.
• Experience in LLM and reinforcement learning.

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. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here.

Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.

For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.

CA, NY, CT, NJ

$240,000—$253,000 USD

WA

$230,000—$243,000 USD

OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI

$221,000—$233,000 USD

All other states

$201,000—$212,000 USD