Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Discovery

Instacart

Posted 4mo ago

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Define and drive the long term technical vision for Shopping ML
Lead development of AI systems that fundamentally improve how customers discover products
Architect large scale ML systems combining LLM reasoning, retrieval, ranking, recommendation models, and personalization
Build and operate production ML systems powering real time shopping experiences
Identify foundational ML capabilities that unlock new customer experiences
Partner with senior leaders across product, engineering, and data science
Influence company wide ML architecture
Mentor senior/staff engineers

Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or related field, or equivalent industry experience
10+ years building and operating large scale machine learning systems in production
Proven track record architecting ML systems that power core product experiences at global scale
Deep expertise in recommendation systems, ranking models, embeddings, representation learning, or search systems
Experience combining generative AI with traditional ML systems such as retrieval, ranking, and personalization
Experience designing ML platforms that support large scale experimentation, training, and deployment
Ability to influence senior engineering and product leaders and drive technical strategy
Experience mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar across teams

Experience building search, discovery, or recommendation systems for large consumer platforms
Expertise in large language models, agentic AI systems, or tool using AI architectures
Experience fine tuning and distilling LLMs for low latency production systems, balancing model quality, latency, and cost
Experience building ML infrastructure supporting large scale experimentation and model deployment
Background working on e-commerce, marketplaces, or large consumer platforms
Recognized technical leadership through publications, patents, conference talks, or open source contributions

Skills