Information Retrieval Engineer, Search Platform (Staff/Senior)
We're transforming the grocery industry
Instacart is the North American leader in online grocery and one of the fastest-growing companies in e-commerce. Since 2012, we’ve been working towards creating a world where everyone has access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together.
Groceries delivered to your door in as little as an hour. It seems simple, right? Well, it’s more complex than that. From re-routing deliveries during snowstorms, to connecting customers with coupons and deals for their favorite brands, to updating over half a billion grocery data lines every night...our efforts bring Instacart closer to being the operating system for the grocery industry.
Solving these problems is what helps our customers get back time in their day, so they can do more of what they love.
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As the future of work evolves, so do we. We have a hybrid model where our roles are open to in-office, flex, or remote work. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.
Accommodations & Accessibility
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OVERVIEW
Instacart has the largest catalog of grocery items in the world, and we’re looking for an outstanding Information Retrieval (IR) engineer to make searching it a seamless experience. This catalog needs to be constantly updated while it’s being searched by millions of people, so one of the challenges is how to structure and search this information. This requires running complex machine learning algorithms, which helps our customers discover the items they need. It’s a challenging optimization problem that requires in-depth knowledge of distributed systems, information retrieval, and machine learning applications in search.
You will have the opportunity to shape the future of e-commerce by creating state of the art search infrastructure that allows people to seamlessly search all the major stores around them to find what they need.
ABOUT THE JOB
- This is a senior individual contributor role, leading projects with significant impact on customer experience and revenue.
- You will build new platforms to help machine learning teams build models for improving selection and ranking of search results based on a combination of user, product, and store related factors.
- You will design and code highly scalable, flexible and dynamic IR systems.
- You will work with Machine Learning Engineers to help them implement sophisticated retrieval and ranking algorithms at scale.
- You will participate in the entire development lifecycle of search projects - from concept to production release.
- You will collaborate with Machine Learning Engineers, Economists, Data Scientists and Product Managers in crafting and implementing your technical vision.
- You will coach and mentor the next generation of strong engineers on the team.
ABOUT YOU
- Hands on experience building IR applications infrastructure. That is, index construction, data partitioning, query processing, and serving search results.
- Strong engineering skills, with expertise in Lucene, Solr, ElasticSearch or similar tools.
- Experience with SQL and major open source RDBMSs such as Mysql and Postgres
- An applied research mindset that keeps you close to recent developments in IR and machine learning.
- Experience building large scale distributed systems.
- Strong communicator, who can collaborate with diverse stakeholders across all levels
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