Machine Learning Engineer, PhD Intern (Fall)
Instacart
•$42 - $50•Remote
About The Position
Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by providing convenient, affordable, and accessible grocery delivery. Machine learning is central to their intelligent shopping experiences, used to elevate customer experience, improve efficiency, and reduce cost. They build state-of-the-art models for Search, Discovery, and Ads, create product and knowledge graphs, and redefine traditional domains with AI. This role involves working on high-impact problems at the intersection of LLM research, large-scale ML systems, and real-world e-commerce applications.
Requirements
- Ph.D. student in computer science, mathematics, statistics, economics, or related areas.
- Strong programming (Python, Golang) and algorithmic skills.
- Solid foundations in machine learning, algorithms, or optimization.
- Curious, self-motivated, and comfortable working on open-ended problems.
Nice To Haves
- Ph.D. student at a top tier university in the United States.
- Hands-on experience with generative or traditional modeling frameworks (PyTorch, Tensorflow, vLLM).
- Prior industry or research internship in machine learning or AI.
- Interest and experience in translating research ideas into scalable production systems.
Responsibilities
- Work on high-impact problems at the intersection of LLM research, large-scale ML systems, and real-world e-commerce applications.
- Potentially work in areas such as query understanding, search relevance and ranking, generative recommendations, LLM evaluation and AIQA systems, low-latency and scalable LLM systems, knowledge graphs, or sequence modeling.
- Understand user intent, refine queries, and support downstream retrieval and ranking using AI and LLM-based techniques.
- Improve search relevance by incorporating signals from user behavior, catalog knowledge, and generative models.
- Develop scalable feedback and reward modeling approaches for closed-loop learning.
- Build LLM-based evaluation frameworks to improve the quality and reliability of generative and agentic systems.
- Research techniques to deploy LLMs in high-traffic, latency-sensitive production environments.
- Work on graph data management and knowledge discovery over grocery catalogs.
- Build temporal models for user behavior prediction.
Benefits
- Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits.
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What This Job Offers
Career Level
Intern
Education Level
Ph.D. or professional degree
