Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Instacart is transforming the grocery industry by delivering groceries and household goods while creating flexible earning opportunities for Personal Shoppers. The Director will lead engineering and machine learning strategy for agentic AI solutions for retail partners, build high-performing teams, and guide products from customer discovery through production deployment and scaling.
Responsibilities
- Lead the engineering and machine learning strategy for agentic AI solutions designed to address the needs of Instacart’s retail partners
- Build, mentor, and inspire high-performing engineering and science teams, creating an environment that supports technical excellence, experimentation, and strong execution
- Partner directly with retailers, product leaders, consultants, data scientists, machine learning engineers, and forward-deployed engineers to translate complex business problems into impactful AI products
- Guide the development of systems that combine advanced machine learning, data, software engineering, and agentic capabilities, with an emphasis on reliability, scalability, usability, and measurable customer value
- Establish direction in a zero-to-one product space, balancing long-term technical strategy with the need to move quickly, learn from early deployments, and adapt to changing customer and business requirements
- Represent Enterprise AI across the organization, communicating tradeoffs, progress, risks, and opportunities to senior stakeholders and building alignment across technical and commercial teams
Skills
- Demonstrated experience building and deploying agentic AI, generative AI, or machine learning products in production environments
- Experience leading engineering, machine learning, data science, or applied science teams through product development and delivery
- Experience partnering with product, business, customer-facing, and technical stakeholders to define requirements and deliver solutions to complex problems
- Strong understanding of machine learning development practices, software engineering principles, data systems, and the operational considerations required to scale AI applications
- Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, prioritize work, manage ambiguity, and deliver results in a fast-changing environment
- Deep technical expertise in agentic systems, large language models, machine learning platforms, or related areas of applied artificial intelligence
- Experience delivering applied machine learning products at significant scale, including systems used by external customers or business partners
- Experience leading cross-functional initiatives that span engineering, machine learning, data science, product, consulting, and customer-facing teams
- Experience working directly with retailers, commerce platforms, or other enterprise customers to translate operational challenges into technology solutions
- A track record of creating clarity and momentum in zero-to-one product environments while maintaining high standards for quality, responsible development, and customer impact
Benefits
- Flex First work arrangement: employees can choose to work from home, an office, or a favorite coffee shop, with regular in-person events.
- This role is eligible for a new hire equity grant.
- This role is eligible for annual refresh grants.
Company Overview
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