Remote opportunity at
InstacartSenior Software Engineer II - Ads Quality
Instacart operates an online grocery platform connecting consumers with retail goods while offering earning opportunities for personal shoppers. The company is hiring a remote Senior Software…
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About This Role
Instacart operates an online grocery platform connecting consumers with retail goods while offering earning opportunities for personal shoppers. The company is hiring a remote Senior Software Engineer II for its Ads Quality team to focus on machine learning infrastructure. In this position, the engineer will lead technical direction for data processing, feature pipelines, and model training and serving solutions across the advertising funnel. The work involves optimizing systems for stability,…
Job Description
Instacart operates an online grocery platform connecting consumers with retail goods while offering earning opportunities for personal shoppers. The company is hiring a remote Senior Software Engineer II for its Ads Quality team to focus on machine learning infrastructure.
In this position, the engineer will lead technical direction for data processing, feature pipelines, and model training and serving solutions across the advertising funnel. The work involves optimizing systems for stability, latency, and cost while helping scale next-generation modeling capabilities, including large language models and real-time sequential foundation models.
The role suits an experienced engineer with a background in machine learning systems who enjoys collaborating across product, data science, and engineering functions to improve advertising performance and operational efficiency. Instacart uses a Flex First approach, allowing staff to work remotely from home, an office, or other locations while gathering for periodic in-person events.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and deploy machine learning infrastructure to address marketplace challenges and advance the training and serving platform.
- Collaborate with the ML Foundation team to create solutions tailored to advertising needs.
- Profile real systems and eliminate bottlenecks in training and serving funnels to improve throughput, cost, and latency.
- Address system instabilities and operational shortcomings to achieve high availability.
- Construct real-time feature processing infrastructure, including low-latency pipelines for fresh feature computation and serving.
- Lead the infrastructure foundation for real-time sequential foundation models, covering online sequence feature stores, streaming update paths, and efficient long-context serving.
- Partner with product managers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers to co-design systems respecting product, model architecture, and infrastructure constraints.
- Mentor engineering personnel, establish technical direction, and perform code reviews to maintain code quality.
Requirements
- Hold a graduate degree in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, operations research, or have equivalent self-study and experience.
- Possess at least three years of industry experience building machine learning infrastructure or applying machine learning to solve real-world problems with large datasets.
- Demonstrate expertise in building, scaling, and managing machine learning infrastructure for production training or serving.
- Show strong software engineering programming skills in languages such as Python or Go.
- Demonstrate proficiency in data manipulation tools including SQL, Spark, and Pandas, alongside machine learning frameworks like Torch, TensorFlow, or XGBoost.
Qualifications
- Bring five or more years of industry experience technically leading a team focused on machine learning infrastructure or large dataset applications.
- Demonstrate experience solving model training and serving efficiency challenges, such as optimizing pipelines and reducing training times.
- Possess hands-on experience with real-time or online feature processing, streaming systems like Kafka or Flink, online feature stores, and low-latency retrieval.
- Show familiarity with sequential modeling, transformer architectures, generative retrieval, or large-scale online recommendation systems.
- Have background serving large sequential or foundation models in low-latency, high-QPS production environments.
- Bring experience working within digital advertising platforms.
- Show familiarity with large language model integrations, prompt engineering, and productivity tools.
Core Skills
Benefits
- Market-competitive compensation dependent on permanent work location
- New hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants
- Flex First remote work policy allowing employees to work from home, an office, or other locations
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this position remote?
Yes, this is a remote role utilizing Instacart's Flex First policy, which allows employees to choose where they work while staying connected through regular in-person events.
What is the employment type?
The source posting indicates that this position is full-time.
What salary does this position offer?
Base pay ranges vary by location for US-based candidates, ranging from $192,000 to $242,500 depending on the state, and the role is also eligible for new hire and annual equity grants.
What are the core experience requirements?
Candidates must have a graduate degree or equivalent experience, at least three years of industry experience building machine learning infrastructure or solving problems with large datasets, and strong programming skills in languages like Python or Go.
Sample Interview Questions
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