About the job
Join Us in Revolutionizing the Grocery Industry
At Instacart, we believe in the power of food to bring people together, ensuring everyone has access to their favorite groceries while having more time to enjoy them. We perceive grocery delivery as a complex challenge filled with opportunities to meet the diverse needs of our community. Our mission is to provide an essential service that customers trust to deliver groceries and household items, while also offering flexible earning opportunities to our Personal Shoppers.
Instacart has become a vital resource for millions, and we are expanding our team to drive our mission forward. If you're ready to make a significant impact and do your best work, we invite you to be part of our journey.
Flex First Work Culture
We recognize that there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach to optimal performance. Our team members enjoy the flexibility to choose their preferred work environment—be it from home, at an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while fostering connections through regular in-person gatherings. Discover more about our flexible work philosophy.
Position Overview
As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer II on the Ads Response Prediction team, you will spearhead the design and development of pivotal ML models that drive Instacart’s advertising ecosystem. This research-oriented role emphasizes theoretical problem formulation, training methodologies, and model quality instead of infrastructure or full-stack engineering. You will address key challenges in pCTR modeling, such as alleviating selection bias, position bias, and the optimizer’s curse in training data, enhancing model calibration across various surfaces and domains, and advancing our multi-task learning and sequence modeling capabilities. Additionally, you will have the chance to influence our next-generation foundation model strategy for ads ranking and contribute to innovative retrieval systems like TIGER (Transformer Index for Generative Recommenders), Semantic ID, and domain language models.
The Ads Response Prediction team is responsible for all systems, algorithms, and ML models that ensure a relevant and engaging advertising experience for customers across all Instacart-powered platforms. This encompasses search and exploration retrieval systems, sequential modeling, generative retrieval systems for next interaction recommendations, LLM integrations, relevance models, and more.

