OVERVIEW

The Fulfillment Marketplace system sits at the core of Instacart. We build industry leading technology to power a balanced, sustainable and resilient marketplace that efficiently meets customer demand, incentivizes shoppers, and offers a widening range of high quality services. Our engineering teams are world-class experts in systems, algorithms, machine learning, optimization and operations research, working together to drive technology innovations in areas such as routing, matching, pricing, forecasting, incentives that enable best product experiences for our customers and shoppers.

Given the scale and growth of our platform and the combinatorial explosion of logistics possibilities, our system needs to handle billions of computations in real time and provide optimal solutions that lead to the most efficient and reliable way of fulfilling customer orders. We rely heavily on state-of-the-art data infrastructure and online inference architectures paired with best-in-class modeling techniques and methodologies so as to adapt to the dynamic nature of customer demand, available inventory, and shopper supply. As a technologist, joining our team means working on endless fun and challenging problems with a brilliant team that has been central to, and is playing an increasingly critical role to the growth of the Instacart platform. 

ABOUT THE JOB

• This is an individual contributor role with significant impact both within the machine learning team and on product team(s) you will collaborate with
• You will be responsible for technical roadmaps and will collaborate with Product Management, Data science, Product Engineering and Design to shape the overall product roadmap
• You will conceive and lead projects while being a hands-on builder of machine learning software components in the production environment that directly drive customer impact 
• You will be a strategic thought partner for leaders across the organization on driving business impact through machine learning
• You will coach and mentor the next generation of strong engineers on the team

A few project examples: Services & Pricing, Logistics, Dynamic Pricing, Marketplace Balancing

• Imagine an on-line shopping experience where delivery options and pricing are dynamically constructed to boost your shopping experience. 
• We aim to bring such a personalized delivery experience to online shopping. The goal is to let people order whatever they want, whenever it's convenient, for a price that fits their budget.
• Machine learning models play a major role in predicting the ETA of delivering an order to any user, the capacity of each delivery option based on real-time shopper supply, and the corresponding pricing of each delivery option. 
• We work on improving all these models on Instacart to present the most desirable shopping experience for each user, in order to retain loyal customers and gain new customers. 
• Logistics works on a range of interesting and challenging problems, from making sure orders are fulfilled efficiently and on-time to helping customers decide what to buy. 
• Dynamic Pricing owns how we pay for work. We pay multi-billion dollars annually to shoppers and it is the vast majority of the spend needed to run our business. 
• We're working to overcome big challenges, including adjusting in real-time to local supply and demand conditions across multiple countries, supporting massive scale for our optimization engines, and figuring out how to structure pay for next-generation fulfillment models and products. 
• Marketplace balancing is aimed to optimize Instacart’s demand and supply distributions through forecasting, decision making, and balancing levers. Typical forecasting projects include: building ML based forecasting models, tracking real-time demand/supply events, and building scalable forecasting pipelines and systems. 
• The decision-making system consumes demand/supply forecasts and makes coordinated and optimized decisions on when, where and how to apply particular balancing levers to match demand and supply. 
• The charter of the balancing levers includes the development, measurement, and optimization of various demand shaping techniques, and supply acquisition, promotion, and engagement channels.

ABOUT YOU

• Strong expertise in one or more of the areas: machine learning, operations research to solve optimal routing, inventory management, marketing mix optimization, pricing, or time-series forecasting
• Have 6+ years of industry experience developing machine learning models with large datasets and related production engineering to solve real-world problems end to end
• Have a graduate degree in artificial intelligence, machine learning or equivalent self study and experience
• Have strong programming skills in Python (or similar languages) and fluency in data manipulation (SQL, Spark, Pandas) and machine learning (scikit-learn, XGBoost, Keras/Tensorflow) tools
• Have experience leading multiple projects of varying scope and complexity in more than one problem space
• Are a technical leader who is comfortable handling projects of significant complexity and ambiguity
• Are a strong communicator who can collaborate with diverse stakeholders across all levels

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