[Remote] Senior Software Engineer II, AI Labs & Foundations

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by leveraging AI technology to enhance shopping experiences. As a Senior Software Engineer in AI Labs & Foundations, you will design and operate high-scale production systems for innovative AI applications, directly impacting millions of customers. This role involves collaboration with cross-functional teams to deliver AI features and drive engineering excellence in production environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate production AI-powered systems and agentic experiences (including Cart Assistant and voice AI) that directly impact how millions of customers shop
• Build foundational systems for cutting-edge AI experiences, ranging from embedding infrastructure and voice AI pipelines, to client facing components and integrations, by prototyping bold ideas and productizing what works
• Integrate foundation models via APIs and open-source frameworks; apply techniques like retrieval-augmented generation and vector search where appropriate
• Own projects end-to-end: requirements, technical design, implementation, testing, deployment, observability, and iterative improvement focused on reliability, latency, and cost efficiency
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners in product, design, data science, and infrastructure to ship AI features end-to-end
• Drive engineering excellence, including thoughtful system design, rigorous code review, and technical leadership that includes defining and promoting best practices for AI/ML production engineering across the team

Skills

• Proven senior software engineer who has built, shipped, and operated production systems at scale. You make architectural calls, own what you build, and deliver through ambiguity
• Hands-on experience with AI or ML in production. You've shipped LLM-powered features or integrated foundation model APIs into a live product, demonstrating the necessary expertise at the intersection of robust software engineering and deep production ML
• Experience owning services end-to-end, including CI/CD, automated testing, observability (logging, metrics, tracing), and on-call participation
• Strong communicator who partners well across disciplines - you want to get to the right answer, not just defend the first one
• Excitement and ability to leverage cutting-edge development tools, including AI assistance (e.g., Copilot, Cursor, Claude), to maximize velocity
• 5 to 8+ years of industry experience
• A track record of 0-to-1 work taking unconventional ideas from prototype through rapid iteration to production
• Experience building conversational agents, multi-turn dialogue systems, or agentic LLM applications
• Experience with STT/TTS or natural language interfaces, LLM fine tuning, ML transfer learning, model training and the vocabulary of measurement of model performance
• Experience with embedding systems, vector search, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, or Elasticsearch)
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP), containers (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Experience with event-driven or distributed systems (e.g., Kafka)
• Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership within cross-functional teams

Benefits

• Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work.
• This role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.
• Flex First remote work policy
• Please read more about our benefits offerings here.

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