Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by leveraging AI technology to enhance shopping experiences. As a Senior Software Engineer in AI Labs & Foundations, you will design and operate high-scale production systems for innovative AI applications, directly impacting millions of customers. This role involves collaboration with cross-functional teams to deliver AI features and drive engineering excellence in production environments.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate production AI-powered systems and agentic experiences (including Cart Assistant and voice AI) that directly impact how millions of customers shop
- Build foundational systems for cutting-edge AI experiences, ranging from embedding infrastructure and voice AI pipelines, to client facing components and integrations, by prototyping bold ideas and productizing what works
- Integrate foundation models via APIs and open-source frameworks; apply techniques like retrieval-augmented generation and vector search where appropriate
- Own projects end-to-end: requirements, technical design, implementation, testing, deployment, observability, and iterative improvement focused on reliability, latency, and cost efficiency
- Collaborate with cross-functional partners in product, design, data science, and infrastructure to ship AI features end-to-end
- Drive engineering excellence, including thoughtful system design, rigorous code review, and technical leadership that includes defining and promoting best practices for AI/ML production engineering across the team
Skills
- Proven senior software engineer who has built, shipped, and operated production systems at scale. You make architectural calls, own what you build, and deliver through ambiguity
- Hands-on experience with AI or ML in production. You've shipped LLM-powered features or integrated foundation model APIs into a live product, demonstrating the necessary expertise at the intersection of robust software engineering and deep production ML
- Experience owning services end-to-end, including CI/CD, automated testing, observability (logging, metrics, tracing), and on-call participation
- Strong communicator who partners well across disciplines - you want to get to the right answer, not just defend the first one
- Excitement and ability to leverage cutting-edge development tools, including AI assistance (e.g., Copilot, Cursor, Claude), to maximize velocity
- 5 to 8+ years of industry experience
- A track record of 0-to-1 work taking unconventional ideas from prototype through rapid iteration to production
- Experience building conversational agents, multi-turn dialogue systems, or agentic LLM applications
- Experience with STT/TTS or natural language interfaces, LLM fine tuning, ML transfer learning, model training and the vocabulary of measurement of model performance
- Experience with embedding systems, vector search, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, or Elasticsearch)
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP), containers (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes)
- Experience with event-driven or distributed systems (e.g., Kafka)
- Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership within cross-functional teams
Benefits
- Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work.
- This role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.
- Flex First remote work policy
- Please read more about our benefits offerings here.
Company Overview
Instacart is an online grocery platform that offers same-day delivery and pickup services for retailers and consumers. It was founded in 2012, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA, with a workforce of 1001-5000 employees. Its website is https://www.instacart.com.