Forward Deployed Engineer

Instacart

9d•$169,000 - $214,000•Remote

About The Position

Instacart's Enterprise Solutions team is building a first-of-its-kind business: embedding directly with enterprise retail and CPG partners to design, sell, and deliver AI-powered solutions at scale. This role is part of a small, senior, field-first pod that functions as a startup and consultancy, defining the playbook as they go. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will be the hands-on technical presence within enterprise customer environments, understanding their infrastructure and building agentic AI solutions. You will collaborate with partner technical leaders on solution designs, work with Instacart R&D to inform platform evolution, and act as a bridge between internal development and real-world application.

Requirements

5+ years of software engineering experience with a demonstrated ability to write and ship production-quality code.
Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs, function calling, tool use, agent frameworks, or RAG pipelines—you have shipped something agentic that real users depended on.
Proficiency in Python or another scripting/backend language commonly used in data-intensive environments.
Proven ability to integrate with messy, heterogeneous enterprise data environments — undocumented APIs, schema mismatches, auth complexity, and legacy systems that do not behave the way the docs claim.
Direct experience with external enterprise customers or technical stakeholders in a consulting or customer-facing capacity — earning trust in the room matters as much as writing code.
Strong working knowledge of retail and e-commerce system fundamentals.
Strong communication skills — able to translate field learnings and technical findings into actionable input for R&D and product teams.
Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where the process is not fully defined.

Nice To Haves

Prior work in a forward deployed, embedded engineering, or professional services capacity.
Background at a startup or early-stage company where you wore multiple hats.
Experience in enterprise software implementation, systems integration, or solutions engineering.
Exposure to retail tech, e-commerce, or supply chain systems.

Responsibilities

Embed with enterprise retail customers and partners to understand their technical environments, data systems, and business workflows.
Design, build, and deploy AI and agentic solutions tailored to each customer's specific infrastructure and needs, across Instacart's full platform suite.
Extend, adapt, and integrate Instacart's core AI capabilities to fit customer ecosystems, even when those systems are undocumented or non-standard.
Maintain a close working relationship with R&D: participate in product reviews, flag platform gaps encountered in the field, and propose concrete changes that would make the platform work better for enterprise customers.
Collaborate closely with the AI Solutions Architect to translate domain requirements and architecture into working software.
Serve as the primary technical point of contact for customers during implementation engagements.