Senior Data Scientist - Shopping Experience (Search)

ABOUT THE ROLE Instacart's Shopping Experience team is focused on making it fast and effortless for customers to find the right items within a single retailer and complete their order with confidence. 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 You will own core Search metrics and funnels end to end, including defining guardrails, monitoring performance across platforms and segments, and diagnosing conversion gaps. You will design, run, and interpret experiments across ranking, retrieval, and search UX, turning ambiguous or conflicting outcomes into crisp, data-driven recommendations. You will partner with Product, Engineering, and Machine Learning to prioritize opportunities, size impact, and influence the roadmap for relevance, quality, and latency improvements that unlock measurable business outcomes. You will build 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. WHAT 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 Instacart is a Flex First team, offering 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 - Flexible work arrangement - Competitive salary and benefits package - Opportunity to work with a leading company in the grocery industry - Collaborative and dynamic work environment - Professional development and growth opportunities - Comprehensive health plan - Parental leave - Education stipend - Life insurance - Equipment stipend - Flexible schedule