Staff Software Engineer, CarrotAI
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 investing heavily in the next-generation of AI on Instacart. At our velocity and volume-level we need the ability to deploy new products and features faster and better. That’s our choice for the traditional 3-dimensional engineering trade-off decision. Come help to build the best new user experience anywhere. We are creating new architectural designs and new services that couple best-in-class engineering with highly-informed business knowledge.
ABOUT THE TEAM
Instacart has a four sided marketplace, and we have roles open within each of our Engineering orgs. In our interview process we will evaluate how your skills would fit within one of these teams, and match you with the role(s) that are best related to your interests and abilities.
The Instacart App team focuses on the end customer, building technology and experiences to enrich their everyday lives and make the act of grocery shopping easier and more joyful. Within that space, the CarrotAI team is focused on the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to transform the shopping experience and build out previously unimaginable features. We operate as a tiger team within the company to iterate quickly and bring these experiences from the lab to market.
ABOUT THE JOB
- We work in small teams with significant ownership and autonomy over your project
- You’ll be working across teams, solving big problems at an organizational level that changes how Instacart operates
- Design, implement, and ship high quality features with a strong sense of urgency and accountability
- Work closely with product managers, designers, data scientists, and peer engineering teams to define project requirements and execution plans
- Ensure that system designs including APIs, deployment architecture, and dependency selection result in highly scalable, robust solutions that minimize support costs and improve an outstanding customer experience
- Contribute broadly to Instacart’s success by exercising your freedom to suggest and drive organization-wide initiatives
ABOUT YOU
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS
- 10+ years of software development experience
- A strong sense of ownership
- Self-motivation and an enjoyment for a startup environment
- Experience working with ML systems, ML Engineers and ML Researchers
- Solid understanding of common back-end Web technologies in a production environment
- An ability to balance priorities with shipping high quality and pragmatic solutions
- Experience working with a large codebase shared with multi-functional teams.
- Strong knowledge of SQL
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, computer engineering, electrical engineering or equivalent work experience
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
Do you have exceptional experience with, skills for, or just interest in any of the following software engineering areas? We are looking for someone who has a good mix of the following traits:
- ML: Expertise in application of advanced query understanding models/ LLMs, search retrieval, and ranking
- Experiment frameworks and data driven approach to development
Instacart's technology is constantly evolving and adapting. Some of the technologies you would use in our teams at Instacart include:
- Ruby on Rails framework using Sorbet for strong-typing
- Python and advanced ML modeling frameworks
- Client-facing flexible APIs exposed via GraphQL
- Postgres and Snowflake backend relational data stores
- Async durable event handling infrastructure including async RPC via AWS SNS/SQS, RabbitMQ
- Caching and durable job dispatching using Memcached and Redis
- Auto-scaling elastic service deployments built on AWS ECS, ALBs, and supporting cloud services
- Rich monitoring and alerting infrastructure built on AWS Cloud Watch, DataDog, Sentry, OpsGenie and supporting services
- Any new integrations you will research, propose, implement, and deploy!
#LI-Remote
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
$234,000—$260,000 USD
WA
$224,000—$249,000 USD
OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI
$214,000—$238,000 USD
All other states
$195,000—$217,000 USD
Accommodations & Accessibility
At Instacart, we strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you need assistance submitting an application through our career site due to a disability, please submit an Accommodations Request Form and someone from our team will reach out soon to see how we may be able to assist.
