Forward Deployed Engineer

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry, offering an essential service that delivers groceries and household goods. We are a Flex First team, giving employees flexibility to work from home, an office, or elsewhere while staying connected through in-person events.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer on the Enterprise Solutions team, you will be Instacart's hands-on technical presence inside enterprise customer environments. You will sit inside retailers' and partners' ecosystems, understand their infrastructure, and build agentic AI solutions on top of it. You will collaborate with partner technical leaders, design solutions compatible with existing environments, and work closely with Instacart R&D to inform platform evolution.

• Embed with enterprise retail customers and partners to understand their technical environments, data systems, and business workflows.
• Design, build, and deploy AI and agentic solutions tailored to each customer's infrastructure and needs across Instacart's full platform suite.
• Extend, adapt, and integrate Instacart's core AI capabilities to fit customer ecosystems, even when systems are undocumented or non-standard.
• Maintain a close working relationship with R&D, participate in product reviews, flag platform gaps, and propose concrete changes.
• Collaborate with the AI Solutions Architect to translate domain requirements into working software.
• Serve as the primary technical point of contact for customers during implementation engagements.

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated ability to write and ship production-quality code.
• Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs, function calling, tool use, agent frameworks, or RAG pipelines—you have shipped something agentic that real users depended on.
• Proficiency in Python or another scripting/backend language commonly used in data-intensive environments.
• Proven ability to integrate with messy, heterogeneous enterprise data environments—undocumented APIs, schema mismatches, auth complexity, and legacy systems.
• Direct experience with external enterprise customers or technical stakeholders in a consulting or customer-facing capacity.
• Strong working knowledge of retail and e-commerce system fundamentals.
• Strong communication skills and comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.

For Canadian based candidates, the base pay range is CAN$185,000—$195,000 CAD. This role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.