OVERVIEW

About the Role

This is a general posting for multiple Data Science roles open across our 4-sided marketplace. You’ll get the chance to learn about the different problems the Data Science team solves as you go through the process. Towards the end of your process, we’ll do a team-matching exercise to determine which of the open roles/teams you’ll join. You can find a blurb on each team at the bottom of this page.

About the Team

You will be joining a growing data science team and will tackle some of the most challenging and impactful problems that are transforming how people buy groceries every day. You will be embedded within our data-driven product team as a trusted partner in uncovering barriers in the product’s usability and utilize these insights to inform product improvements that drive angle-changing growth. We’re looking for a self-driven, strategic thinker who can hit the ground running to ultimately influence decision-making across the entire organization.

ABOUT THE JOB

• Own analytical frameworks that guide the product roadmap
• Design rigorous experiments and interpret results to draw detailed and actionable conclusions
• Develop statistical models to extract trends, measure results, and predict future performance of our product
• Build simulations to project impact of various product and policy interventions
• Enable objective decision making across the company by democratizing data through dashboards and other analytical tools
• Use expertise in causal inference, machine learning, complex systems modeling, behavioral decision theory etc. to shape the future of Instacart
• Present findings in a compelling way to influence Instacart’s leadership

ABOUT YOU

Minimum Qualifications

• 2+ years experience working in a quantitative role at a product company or a research organization
• Ability to run rigorous experiments and come up with scientifically sound recommendations
• Ability to write complex, efficient, and eloquent SQL queries to extract data
• Ability to write efficient and eloquent code in Python or R
• A desire to build and improve consumer software products
• Ability to translate business needs into analytical frameworks
• Eagerness to learn, flexibility to pivot when needed, savviness to navigate and thrive in a dynamic environment, and a growth mindset needed to build a successful team and company

Preferred Qualifications

• Awareness of business trade offs when working on a multi-sided marketplace
• Confidence in collaborating with and influencing cross-functional stakeholders (i.e. Product, Engineering), at a senior level
• MS/PhD in Statistics, Economics, Applied Mathematics, or a similar field

OPEN ROLES:

Ads Measurement

The ads measurement data science team at Instacart is responsible for understanding the performance of our ad products as well as understanding user behavior and helping advertisers optimize their strategies. This is a growing team with a lot of potential in the next year; we have some of the foundations of measurement down, but there is a lot of open space to explore and drive impact for our business and our CPG & retail partners.

Auction & Ranking

The auction and ranking team is at the center of all of our ad products' operations. This team is responsible for figuring out how our auction should price and rank the billions of ads that we show each day to users. The team works on marketplace dynamics, trying to balance value across our users, advertisers, retailers and Instacart to make sure that our business is setup for success in the long term.

Carrot AI

Carrot AI is a small team that looks to introduce LLM technology to the platform through building products like Meals (recipe suggestions) and Carebot (that handles customer issues and provides help). It is also being used to facilitate smarter UX in general. The group is part of the greater initiative to increase AI adoption internally by engineers and data scientists by building specific tools. This role will involve a healthy mixture of experimentation (a/b testing on LLM-powered features), as well as research (developing and deploying ML-based solutions to solve org-wide problems, in partnership with MLEs).

Discover

The Discover team at Instacart aims to make it effortless for customers to effortlessly shop the food and products they need to power their lives. In this role, you’ll work closely with product, engineering, and machine learning partners across experimentation, product development, and model iteration. You’ll work with the team to identify opportunities to improve the customer shopping experience by balancing their needs to both shop efficiently and also discover new products they’ll love.

Ecosystems

This central unit is integral to supporting executive decision-making and company strategy. As a data scientist on the ecosystem team, you will be conducting analyses that span various parts of the business such as consumer, advertiser, retailer, and more. You will engage closely with leaders across different functions. Your insights will play a crucial role in integrating new concepts into Instacart’s overarching business strategy. This role is pivotal in evaluating Instacart's current operational health, forecasting its short-term trajectory, and guiding the development of its 2-3 year strategic plan.

Growth & Marketing Tech

Instacart's marketing data science team serves as thought partners and problem solvers for the Growth and Marketing orgs, supporting our broader mission to give everyone access to the food they love. We are responsible for understanding the end to end scope of growth marketing, including how marketing shapes and impacts customer behavior both today and in the long run, the efficiency and performance of any marketing technology we utilize, and what the highest ROI investments are in both marketing and marketing technology. We synthesize our insights and knowledge into actionable tactics, optimizations, and strategy within marketing.

Growth Systems

As a Data Scientist on the Growth Systems team, you will play a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of high-priority initiatives such as Marketing Investment Optimization, User Incentives Innovation, Data and Intelligence Foundation. Your responsibilities will include developing analytical frameworks and insights that inform product strategy, investment efficiency, prioritization, and operational excellence. Leveraging your level expertise, you will analyze user behavior, product performance, and market trends, providing recommendations that cut through ambiguity and collaborating cross-functionally to drive projects from conception to execution within this dynamic and innovative team.

Pay, Incentives, and Marketplace Coordination

The Marketplace Dynamics data science group investigates foundational and applied problems at the core of Instacart’s marketplace and fulfillment business. As a data scientist in the Pay, Incentives, and Marketplace Coordination team, you will work on challenging analytical, experimental, and inferential problems to understand and expand the efficient frontier of a balanced, sustainable, and resilient multi-sided marketplace. You will engage closely with machine learning, operations research, product and policy partners to improve marketplace systems, develop new products, and scale experimentation capabilities.

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