Machine Learning Engineer II, Ads Marketplace
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.
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Overview
About the Role:
As a Machine Learning Engineer, you will have the opportunity to collaborate closely with senior engineers and product leaders as part of your team. Together, you'll develop and enhance Instacart's ads systems. You will use machine learning to devise and refine solutions in crucial areas such as ads selection, ranking, auction, and pricing across all of Instacart’s consumer facing pages like Search, storefront, aisle, pre and post checkout experiences, among many others. You will actively contribute to initiatives, assisting in all stages from the initial concept, through prototyping and experimentation, to final implementation.
About the Team:
The Ads Marketplace team is responsible for the systems and algorithms for showing the right ad to the right user at the right time to balance all of user value, advertiser value, and instacart revenue . The team optimizes a multi-sided marketplace to ensure customers see ads that help them try new products/brands, advertisers get their products out in front of appropriate users for a good return on investment, and instacart generates the deserving revenue as well. The team tackles hard problems in a variety of spaces, such as ranking, pricing, personalization, auction, UX as well as foundational problems executing on a high throughput system with dynamic data.
About the Job:
- Design, develop, and deploy machine learning solutions to tackle practical challenges in the ads organization.
- Collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, and backend engineers to deeply understand business needs and create impactful ML applications.
- Actively engage with diverse stakeholders to ensure that solutions are well-integrated and aligned with business goals.
- Push the envelope on our operational efficiency by continually refining and advancing our algorithms and models.
About You:
Minimum Qualifications:
- Have a graduate degree (masters or PhD) in artificial intelligence, machine learning, operations research or equivalent self study and experience
- Have strong programming skills in Python and fluency in data manipulation (SQL, Pandas) and Machine Learning (scikit-learn, XGBoost, Keras/Tensorflow) tools
- Have strong analytical skills and problem-solving ability
- Are a strong communicator who can collaborate with diverse stakeholders across all levels
Preferred Qualifications:
- Have 1-2 years of industry experience using machine learning to solve real-world problems with large datasets
- Knowledge of deep learning frameworks and methodologies
- Experience in applying machine learning and optimization techniques to solve marketplace problems