Opportunity overview
What you should know
We checked this opportunity from Instacart. It is listed as United States.
The work location is Remote. Employer-stated compensation: Salary not included in the job posting.
Job description
About this role
Join Instacart's mission to transform grocery shopping through frontier AI. As a Senior Software Engineer on AI Labs & Foundations, you will design, build, and operate the high-scale production systems that power our most ambitious AI experiences—from Cart Assistant, our conversational shopping agent, to voice AI interactions and beyond. This is a high-impact opportunity to work at the intersection of robust software engineering and cutting-edge production AI/ML, directly shaping products used by millions of customers every day.
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.
Qualifications and requirements
- Proven senior software engineer who has built, shipped, and operated production systems at scale. You make architectural calls, own what you build, and deliver through ambiguity.
- Hands-on experience with AI or ML in production. You've shipped LLM-powered features or integrated foundation model APIs into a live product, demonstrating the necessary expertise at the intersection of robust software engineering and deep production ML.
- 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 - you want to get to the right answer, not just defend the first one.
- 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.
- 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.
The description, responsibilities and qualifications used for this page and its JobPosting data appear above. Use the application action in the Job snapshot to confirm any later changes before applying.
Why you may be eligible
The source lists United States as the eligible location. Confirm that you meet any work-authorization, time-zone and experience requirements.
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How this listing was checked
- Source status
- Applicant-tracking source confirmed
- Employer or source
- Instacart
- Source checked
- September 7, 2026
- Application destination
- Employer or official applicant-tracking website
- Work setup and location
- Remote · Remote
- Who can apply
- United States · Confirmed by source
- Pay
- Not stated by employer
- Deadline
- Not stated by employer
We check the source and visible requirements, but the employer controls changes and the final hiring decision. Confirm the latest requirements before applying.