Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Recommendations

ABOUT THE ROLE We're transforming the grocery industry and we invite you to join our mission to share love through food. As a key member of the Search & Personalization ML team at Instacart, you'll play a critical role in building the ranking backbone that powers every pixel of the shopping journey, optimizing for incremental GTV, basket lift, and retention over the long run. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer on our team, you'll be responsible for architecting the ranking backbone that unifies query understanding, personalization, multi-objective ranking, ads, and merchandising into a single adaptive platform. You'll design and build a search autosuggest system optimized for personalization and value-based relevance, and develop production-grade Multi-Task Learning to jointly learn relevance, propensity, margin, and churn risk. You'll also own the inference layer, advance evaluation practices, and partner across teams to translate business goals into ranking policies and measurable ROI. WHAT YOU'LL NEED To succeed in this role, you'll need a strong background in machine learning, with a Master's degree and 4+ years of experience applying ML at scale, or a PhD with 2+ years of experience. You'll have demonstrated success in applying multi-objective or constrained optimization to balance relevance, revenue, margin, and user experience, and experience with online testing and attribution beyond CTR. You'll be proficient in coding (Python) and data fluency (SQL/Pandas), with expertise in classic ML techniques and deep learning frameworks. WHY REMOTE Instacart is a Flex First team, which means we offer flexible work arrangements that allow you to choose where you do your best work. Whether it's from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop, you'll have the freedom to work in a way that suits your needs while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. BENEFITS Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. The base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location, and we're currently only hiring in the following provinces: Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta.