Senior Software Engineer II, AI Labs & Foundations

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing grocery delivery and household goods, offering flexible earnings opportunities to personal shoppers. The company is a lifeline for millions, and the team is building to push the shopping cart forward.

Join Instacart's mission to transform grocery shopping through frontier AI. As a Senior Software Engineer on AI Labs & Foundations, you will design, build, and operate high-scale production systems that power AI experiences, from Cart Assistant (conversational shopping agent) to voice AI interactions. This is a high-impact opportunity at the intersection of robust software engineering and production AI/ML, directly shaping products used by millions of customers daily.

• 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 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.

• Proven senior software engineer who has built, shipped, and operated production systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience with AI or ML in production; shipped LLM-powered features or integrated foundation model APIs into a live product.
• 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.
• Golang, Python, or Typescript language experience.
• 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.

Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.

For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below:

• CA, NY, CT, NJ: $230,000—$242,500 USD
• WA: $220,000—$232,000 USD
• OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI: $211,000—$222,500 USD
• All other states: $192,000—$202,500 USD

This role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants.