Senior Software Engineer II, AI Labs & Foundations

Instacart

1d • $192,000 - $242,500 • Remote

About The Position

Instacart is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for its AI Labs & Foundations team to design, build, and operate high-scale production systems that power AI experiences like Cart Assistant and voice AI. This role involves working at the intersection of robust software engineering and cutting-edge production AI/ML, directly shaping products used by millions of customers. The team focuses on 0-to-1 thinking, rapid prototyping, and shipping with urgency, while valuing bottom-up ideas and close collaboration with Product, Data Science, ML, and Infrastructure teams. The AI Labs & Foundations team is responsible for building and launching Cart Assistant, pioneering voice AI interactions, and constructing foundational systems for AI innovation at Instacart.

Requirements

• Proven senior software engineer who has built, shipped, and operated production systems at scale.
• Make architectural calls, own what you build, and deliver through ambiguity.
• 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.

Nice To Haves

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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 cutting-edge 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.

Benefits

• Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work.
• Flex First remote work policy.
• New hire equity grant.
• Annual refresh grants.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed