Senior Data Scientist - Shopping Experience (Search)

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing an essential service that connects customers with the food they love. As a Senior Data Scientist on the Shopping Experience team, you will own the analytics and experimentation strategy for Search, partnering with Product, Engineering, and Machine Learning to shape the roadmap for search relevance, ranking quality, and latency. Your work will translate complex, noisy signals into clear insights that drive search conversion, order rate, and GTV, while also strengthening downstream experiences like ads and retailer satisfaction.

• Own core Search metrics and funnels end to end (query → impression → engagement → cart adds), including defining guardrails, monitoring performance, and diagnosing conversion gaps.
• Design, run, and interpret experiments across ranking, retrieval, and search UX, turning ambiguous outcomes into data-driven recommendations.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and ML to prioritize opportunities, size impact, and influence the roadmap for relevance, quality, and latency improvements.
• Build deep diagnostic analyses by query class, price point, surface, and customer lifecycle to pinpoint underperformance and specify concrete changes.
• Connect offline model evaluation with online and business metrics by collaborating with ML partners on evaluation design.
• Improve data quality, instrumentation, and metric definitions for Search.

• 5+ years of experience in data science or product analytics with a track record of impact on consumer-facing products.
• Advanced SQL proficiency, including complex joins and window functions, working with large-scale datasets in modern data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift).
• Proficiency in Python or R for analysis, experimentation, and modeling.
• Hands-on experience designing and analyzing A/B tests end to end, including metric selection, power and sample sizing, covariate adjustment, and decision-making under uncertainty.
• Demonstrated ability to define success metrics, decompose ambiguous product problems, and deliver clear, opinionated recommendations.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative field or equivalent practical experience.
• Comfort using modern AI tooling (e.g., Claude, code assistants, PromptQL) to accelerate analysis.

• Experience in search relevance, ranking, recommendations, personalization, or information retrieval.
• Familiarity with NLP, embeddings, and semantic search.
• Experience bridging offline evaluation metrics (e.g., NDCG, precision/recall) with online experiments.
• Background in causal inference beyond standard A/B tests.
• Comfort working across web and native app surfaces.
• Proven impact improving logging, instrumentation, and metric definitions.

For Canadian-based candidates, the base pay range is CAN$161,000—$170,000 CAD. This role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where employees work.

This role is remote and open to candidates in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. Apply via the provided link.