Senior Software Engineer II - Ads Quality

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing grocery delivery and household goods, offering flexible earnings opportunities to personal shoppers. The company is a Flex First team, allowing employees to choose where they work—from home, an office, or elsewhere—while staying connected through in-person events.

As a Senior Software Engineer II on the Ads Quality team, you will work with software and machine learning engineers to build state-of-the-art systems that optimize ads performance throughout the serving funnel, from retrieval to pricing. You will own the technical direction of data, feature processing, and model training/serving solutions, enabling next-generation modeling opportunities, from utilizing out-of-the-box LLMs to building bespoke Foundation Models. You will eliminate bottlenecks across training and serving systems to optimize stability, latency, and cost. The role involves collaborating with cross-functional teams to turn insights into solutions that elevate advertising effectiveness and operational stability.

• Design, develop, and deploy machine learning infrastructure to tackle practical challenges in the marketplace while advancing the training and serving platform.
• Work with the company-wide ML Foundation team to develop solutions meeting Ads unique needs.
• Optimize training and serving funnel bottlenecks—profiling real systems and driving wins in throughput, cost, and latency, from GPU/accelerator utilization to tail latency at serving time.
• Identify instabilities and shortcomings of systems and operating procedures to deliver best-in-class availability.
• Build real-time feature processing infrastructure—low-latency pipelines that compute, join, and serve fresh features to models on the critical path of every ad request.
• Lead the infrastructure foundation for a real-time sequential foundation model, including online sequence feature stores, streaming update paths, efficient long-context serving, and training pipelines.
• Collaborate with product managers, data scientists, and MLEs to co-design systems where product, model architecture, and infrastructure constraints are solved together.
• Mentor engineers, set technical direction, and conduct thorough code reviews.

• Graduate degree (masters or PhD) in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, operations research, or equivalent self-study and experience.
• 3+ years of industry experience building ML infrastructure or using machine learning to solve real-world problems with large datasets.
• Deep expertise building, scaling, and managing ML infrastructure for training and/or serving in production, with strong understanding of modern machine learning systems and MLOps.
• Strong programming skills in software engineering (e.g., Python, Go), along with expertise in data manipulation using tools (SQL, Spark, Pandas), and ML frameworks (Torch, Tensorflow, XGBoost).
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills; excellent communication skills.

• 5+ years of industry experience tech leading a team to build ML infrastructure or using machine learning to solve real-world problems with large datasets.
• Experience solving complex model training and serving efficiency challenges, including optimizing training pipelines, reducing model training times, and improving serving architectures.
• Hands-on experience with real-time/online feature processing and serving—streaming systems (e.g., Kafka, Flink), online feature stores, and low-latency retrieval on the request path.
• Experience with sequential modeling, transformer architecture, generative retrieval, or building large-scale online recommendation systems.
• Experience serving large sequential or foundation models in low-latency, high-QPS production settings.
• Experience in digital advertising platforms; familiarity with LLM integrations, prompt engineering, and productivity tooling.

Base pay ranges for US-based candidates vary by location: CA, NY, CT, NJ: $230,000—$242,500; WA: $220,000—$232,000; OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI: $211,000—$222,500; all other states: $192,000—$202,500. 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.

Apply through the provided link.