Sr. Data Scientist
Instacart
We're transforming the grocery industry
At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.
Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.
Instacart is a Flex First team
There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.
OVERVIEW
About the Role
This is a general posting for multiple Data Science roles open across our 4-sided marketplace. You’ll get the chance to learn about the different problems the Data Science team solves as you go through the process. At the end of the process, we’ll do a team-matching exercise to determine which of the open roles/teams you’ll join. You can find a blurb on each team at the bottom of this page.
About the Team
You will be joining a growing data science team and will tackle some of the most challenging and impactful problems that are transforming how people buy groceries every day. You will be embedded within our data-driven product team as a trusted partner in uncovering barriers in the product’s usability and utilize these insights to inform product improvements that drive angle-changing growth. We’re looking for a self-driven, strategic thinker who can hit the ground running to ultimately influence decision-making across the entire organization.
ABOUT THE JOB
- Own analytical frameworks that guide the product roadmap
- Design rigorous experiments and interpret results to draw detailed and actionable conclusions
- Develop statistical models to extract trends, measure results, and predict future performance of our product
- Build simulations to project impact of various product and policy interventions
- Enable objective decision making across the company by democratizing data through dashboards and other analytical tools
- Use expertise in causal inference, machine learning, complex systems modeling, behavioral decision theory etc. to shape the future of Instacart
- Present findings in a compelling way to influence Instacart’s leadership
ABOUT YOU
Minimum Qualifications
- 4+ years experience working in a quantitative role at a product company or a research organization
- Ability to run rigorous experiments and come up with scientifically sound recommendations
- Ability to write complex, efficient, and eloquent SQL queries to extract data
- Ability to write efficient and eloquent code in Python or R
- A desire to build and improve consumer software products
- Ability to translate business needs into analytical frameworks
- Eagerness to learn, flexibility to pivot when needed, savviness to navigate and thrive in a dynamic environment, and a growth mindset needed to build a successful team and company
Preferred Qualifications
- Awareness of business trade offs when working on a multi-sided marketplace
- Confidence in collaborating with and influencing cross-functional stakeholders (i.e. Product, Engineering), at a senior level
- MS/PhD in Statistics, Economics, Applied Mathematics, or a similar field
OPEN ROLES:
New Bets
As a Senior Data Scientist on the "New Bets" team, you will play a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of high-priority initiatives such as Instacart Business, Connected Stores, and Health. Your responsibilities will include developing analytical frameworks and insights that inform strategy, prioritization, and operational excellence. Leveraging your senior-level expertise, you will analyze user behavior, product performance, and market trends, providing recommendations that cut through ambiguity and collaborating cross-functionally to drive projects from conception to execution within this dynamic and innovative team.
Payments
As a Senior Data Scientist on the Payments team, your main responsibilities will revolve around steering the core payment strategy through a combination of experimentation and analytics. Your focus will be on optimizing the payment experience to enhance customer conversion and engagement, ultimately contributing to business growth by identifying and implementing new payment options and partnerships. Additionally, your role will involve utilizing data-driven insights to upsell and drive increased engagement in the realm of payment solutions.
Shopper Motivation
The Shopper Motivation Team's mission is to ensure our Shopper base (currently over half a million monthly active shoppers!) has a delightfully positive experience working on the Instacart platform, while fostering a supportive and respectful environment for flexible earnings. As part of the Shopper Motivation team, the lead Data Scientist will employ data analytics, statistical modeling, machine learning, and rigorous experimentation and causal inference techniques to address Shopper pain points, maximize Shopper happiness, and guide product development for critical features in the Instacart Shopper app related to Shoppers finding work, ratings, earnings etc. An ideal candidate for this role has worked for at least four years as a Data Scientist in an embedded product team (with cross-functional partners ranging across product, engineering, design and research), run sophisticated causal analysis (beyond an A/B test), and really enjoys coding in Python. They should have an owner’s mindset and demonstrate the ability to operate independently and efficiently and prioritize a diverse array of responsibilities.
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