Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Quality

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing essential services for grocery delivery. The role involves leading the Ads Engineering team to design AI-powered solutions for Ads Quality, optimizing processes, and mentoring engineers while contributing to a principled engineering culture.

Responsibilities:

• Develop & design innovative AI-powered systems addressing a wide range of Ads Quality challenges, such as: Optimize ads pacing/bidding, retrieval and auction processes toward a diverse set of advertiser goals, balancing short- and long-term objectives
• Balance between user, advertiser, and retailer needs, and turn such solutions into quantifiable, optimizable formulations
• Identify and build gen AI solutions to revolutionize all aspects of the quality stack
• Build advanced generative AI and recommendation frameworks revolutionizing advertiser experience and campaign efficacy
• Construct systems and frameworks to provide intelligent recommendations and assistance to advertisers
• Collaborate with Data Scientists to establish metrics and methodologies for both tracking, optimization, and goaling purposes
• Define & own the Ads Quality technical strategy and roadmap, balancing between both short-term needs and long-term sustainability
• Demonstrates ability to architect and design complex AI / quality components, considering scalability, reliability, performance, and security
• Serves as a technical leader and mentor, guiding and empowering junior ML and software engineers through code and design reviews, knowledge sharing, collaborative problem-solving, improving key engineering processes, and fostering a thriving engineering culture
• Serve as a technical mentor, empowering engineers at all career levels through effective coaching, collaborative code reviews and knowledge sharing to develop the next set of leaders
• Builds and maintains synergies with other ML engineering teams across Instacart; acts as a bridge representing Ads as an influential voice in company-wide technical forums
• Contributes to company-level technical initiatives as a thought leader and key driver of Instacart’s engineering vision & goals
• Note this is a hands-on IC / TL role at the Director+ level. There are no people management expectations

Requirements:

• PhD in AI / ML or related field, or equivalent academic and research experience
• 10+ years of experience as a software and / or ML engineer
• Proven track record of architecting & building production-grade ML systems, AI and quantitative optimization technologies at a global scale
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical discussions and collaborate effectively at senior to executive levels, driving consensus and clarity
• Experience mentoring and developing engineering culture and talent
• Hands-on expertise in building large-scale AI/ML systems bridging generative AI, predictive modeling, and recommendation engines to solve real-world problems
• Deep understanding of Ads Quality systems, including pacing/bidding, yield optimization, retrieval processes, and auction dynamics
• Familiar with AWS, Golang, Spark, Clickhouse, Snowflake, TensorFlow