Ads AI Analytics Lead II

ABOUT THE ROLE We're seeking an Ads AI Analytics Lead to join the Commercial Scaled Intelligence (CSI) team at Instacart. This team is an AI-first group focused on turning data into action, building products that drive revenue growth, operational efficiency, and better outcomes for our customers, shoppers, retailers, brands, and partners. As the Ads AI Analytics Lead, you will own the intelligence behind our Ads agents, designing the semantic and context layer for advertising, and building production-grade agents that analyze campaigns, diagnose performance, and recommend actions that improve ROAS, pacing, and partner outcomes. WHAT YOU'LL DO As the Ads AI Analytics Lead, you will be responsible for defining Ads ontologies and canonical metrics across campaigns, budgets, bids, creatives, audiences, and placements to power consistent reasoning and recommendations. You will also build robust dbt models and curated marts in Snowflake (or BigQuery) with clear data contracts, tests, SLOs, and monitoring; orchestrate pipelines with Airflow. Additionally, you will design and evaluate RAG workflows (hybrid search, re-ranking) with explicit quality and latency targets; iterate via offline/online experiments to improve performance. You will also design agent reasoning, tools, and policies for Ads use cases, including human-in-the-loop approvals and guardrails that balance safety, cost, and speed. WHAT YOU'LL NEED To be successful in this role, you will need a strong background in analytics engineering, data science, or applied AI, with advanced proficiency in Python and SQL. You will also need 2+ years of experience working with ads, retail, or e-commerce data, as well as hands-on experience with dbt and Snowflake or BigQuery, including data modeling, testing, documentation, and managing data contracts. Additionally, you will need experience orchestrating data pipelines with Airflow (or a similar scheduler), including alerting and on-call support for data SLOs. You will also need to be able to design and run offline/online evaluations and A/B or uplift tests; familiarity with experiment design and statistical inference. WHY REMOTE This role is remote-friendly, and we welcome candidates who can collaborate with teams based in New York City. As a member of our team, you will have the flexibility to choose where you do your 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. BENEFITS As a member of our team, you will have access to a comprehensive benefits package, including competitive salary, stock options, and a flexible work environment.