At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.
Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.
Instacart is a Flex First team
There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events.
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:
Commerce Platform
In this role, you’ll work to drive Instacart’s affordability through the promotion and adoption of retailer loyalty and discount programs. This will involve engaging in pricing strategy and optimizations at item, category, retailer, and geo levels to foster long-term growth. You’ll evaluate the effects of platform performance improvements, such as latency reduction for ordering and invoicing. Someone with a background in Economics and/or Statistics will succeed on this team.
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, retrailer, 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 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.
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.