Senior Data Scientist - Shopping Experience (Search)

ABOUT THE ROLE We're transforming the grocery industry at Instacart, where we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. As a Senior Data Scientist dedicated to Search, you'll own the analytics and experimentation strategy that powers how we interpret customer intent and connect it to the most relevant items and retailers. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a key member of Instacart's Shopping Experience team, you'll partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Machine Learning to shape the roadmap for search relevance, ranking quality, and latency. Your work will translate complex, noisy signals into clear insights and recommendations that move the metrics that matter—search conversion, order rate, and GTV—while also strengthening downstream experiences like ads and retailer satisfaction. Your responsibilities will include: - Owning core Search metrics and funnels end to end, including defining guardrails, monitoring performance across platforms and segments, and diagnosing conversion gaps. - Designing, running, and interpreting experiments across ranking, retrieval, and search UX, turning ambiguous or conflicting outcomes into crisp, data-driven recommendations. - Partnering with Product, Engineering, and ML to prioritize opportunities, size impact, and influence the roadmap for relevance, quality, and latency improvements that unlock measurable business outcomes. - Building deep diagnostic analyses by query class, price point, surface, and customer lifecycle to pinpoint where and why Search underperforms and specify concrete changes that will move key outcomes. - Connecting offline model evaluation with online and business metrics by collaborating with ML partners on evaluation design, ensuring model changes reliably improve end-user experience—not just offline scores. - Improving data quality, instrumentation, and metric definitions for Search so that teams can reason about performance with clarity, consistency, and speed. WHAT YOU'LL NEED You'll need to bring a combination of rigorous analytics, strong product sense, and clear communication to drive decisive action in a fast-paced environment. You should enjoy rolling up your sleeves, collaborating across disciplines, and using experimentation to uncover what truly helps customers find the right items quickly. To be successful in this role, you'll need: - 5+ years of experience in data science or product analytics, with a track record of impact on consumer-facing products. - Advanced SQL proficiency, including complex joins and window functions, working with large-scale datasets in modern data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift). - Proficiency in Python or R for analysis, experimentation, and modeling. - Hands-on experience designing and analyzing A/B tests end to end, including metric selection, power and sample sizing, covariate adjustment, and decision-making under uncertainty. - Demonstrated ability to define success metrics, decompose ambiguous product problems, and deliver clear, opinionated recommendations to Product and Engineering partners. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to tailor complex analyses for both technical and non-technical audiences. - Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative field (e.g., Statistics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Economics, Engineering) or equivalent practical experience. - Comfort using modern AI tooling (e.g., Claude, code assistants, PromptQL) to accelerate analysis, experimentation, and communication while exercising strong judgment on quality and reliability. WHY REMOTE