Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Recommendations

Overview

The Search & Personalization ML team is Instacart’s engine for state‑of‑the‑art multi‑task, multi‑objective ranking—unifying search, discovery, recommendation, ads, and merchandising into a single value‑aware platform. Partnering with world‑class engineers, scientists, and PMs, we build the ranking backbone that powers every pixel of the shopping journey, optimizing not just for clicks, but for incremental GTV, basket lift, and retention over the long run.

What We’re Building

• Foundational Ranking Backbone Models: Multi‑task/multi‑objective models (shared encoders + task heads) that jointly learn relevance, conversion, margin contribution, churn risk, and ad quality, enabling consistent decisions across search and recommendations.
• Value‑Aware Optimization: Uplift and long‑horizon value models that steer decisions toward incrementality and LTV, with calibrated constraints on quality, diversity, fairness, and spend pacing—plus gua...