Senior Software Engineer, AI Productivity
Job description
We're transforming the grocery industry
At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.
Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.
Instacart is a Flex First team
There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.
Overview
Instacart’s AI Productivity team builds AI-powered platforms and tools that help our engineers and operators move faster, reduce toil, and deliver higher-quality experiences for customers, shoppers, retailers, and brand partners.
As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you will design, build, and operate production systems that bring large language models and intelligent automation into everyday workflows across Instacart. You’ll partner closely with product, developer platform, ML platform, security, and data teams to ship reliable, secure, and measurable solutions that improve developer velocity and operational efficiency.
You’ll join a collaborative group of approximately 10 engineers who value ownership, iteration, and pragmatic problem solving. If you enjoy rolling up your sleeves, navigating ambiguity, and turning cutting-edge AI into real, scalable products, this role is for you. This position is remote-friendly across Canada.
About the Job
- Design, build, and operate AI-powered services and internal applications—such as code and test assistants, knowledge search, and intelligent chat workflows—that improve developer and operator productivity at scale.
- Implement robust back-end services in languages such as Python, Go, or Java; integrate foundation models via APIs and open-source frameworks; and apply techniques like retrieval-augmented generation and vector search where appropriate.
- Own projects end-to-end, including requirements, technical design, implementation, testing, deployment, observability, on-call participation, and iterative improvements focused on reliability, latency, and cost efficiency.
- Partner with Developer Platform, ML Platform, Security, and Legal to ensure safe and compliant AI usage, including data governance, guardrails, content/prompt safety, and privacy-by-design.
- Define and track success with clear metrics (e.g., adoption, task completion time, DORA/SPACE signals, satisfaction), and run experiments and A/B tests to validate impact and guide iteration.
- Create and maintain shared tooling, libraries, and documentation that raise the bar for applied AI development across Instacart, and mentor teammates on best practices in this fast-paced, evolving space.
About You
Minimum Qualifications
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production services.
- 3+ years of hands-on experience in at least one of: Python, Go, or Java.
- 2+ years of experience integrating ML or LLM capabilities into applications (e.g., via OpenAI, Anthropic, or open-source frameworks such as LangChain or LlamaIndex) and shipping them to production.
- Practical experience with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP), containers (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes).
- Proficiency with SQL and data modeling; experience building or maintaining data pipelines (e.g., Airflow, Dagster, or similar).
- Experience owning services end-to-end, including CI/CD, automated testing, observability (logging, metrics, tracing), and participation in an on-call rotation.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience adapting or fine-tuning foundation models and implementing retrieval-augmented generation with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, or Elasticsearch with vector search).
- Track record of building internal developer tools or platforms adopted by 100+ engineers.
- Experience measuring developer productivity (e.g., DORA/SPACE), instrumenting product analytics, and running A/B or multivariate experiments.
- Knowledge of AI safety, privacy, and compliance practices (e.g., PII redaction, guardrails, model/content moderation, data residency considerations).
- Experience with event-driven systems and microservices (e.g., Kafka, Pub/Sub) and designing resilient distributed systems.
- Ability to build lightweight front-ends for internal tools (e.g., React, TypeScript) to accelerate adoption and feedback loops.
- Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership within cross-functional teams.
#LI-Remote
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. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here. Currently, we are only hiring in the following provinces: Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia.
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. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.
For Canadian based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.