Senior Applied Scientist II, Ads Optimization

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry. We are a Flex First team, allowing employees to work from home, office, or elsewhere.

The Advertiser Optimization team is the decision-making engine of Instacart's $1B+ ads business, owning systems for Bidding, Pacing, Budgeting, and Targeting. We are hiring a Senior Applied Scientist II to lead algorithmic direction, focusing on control theory, constrained optimization, and auction economics.

• Design and evolve real-time bid optimization systems.
• Formulate bidding as constrained optimization and build feedback mechanisms.
• Build budget pacing algorithms.
• Develop analytical frameworks connecting bidding, pacing, and budgeting.
• Shape auction mechanics including reserve pricing and multi-slot allocation.
• Own research-to-production loop: diagnose, hypothesize, experiment, ship, measure.
• Write technical strategy documents.

Minimum qualifications: Graduate degree in operations research, applied mathematics, control systems, computational economics, or related field. 8+ years building and deploying optimization/control systems in production. Strong foundation in at least two of: feedback control theory, convex/stochastic optimization, auction theory/mechanism design, dynamic programming. Proficiency in Go, Java, C++ for production systems and Python for data analysis. Ability to translate math into production code at scale.

Preferred: Experience with real-time bidding, ad auction optimization, computational advertising, budget-constrained allocation, adaptive/model-predictive control, causal inference, experimental design, and cross-functional alignment.

Base pay ranges by location: CA, NY, CT, NJ: $240,000—$253,500; WA: $230,000—$243,000; OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI: $221,000—$233,000; All other states: $201,000—$212,000. Eligible for new hire equity grant and annual refresh grants.