Forward Deployed Engineer

Overview

Instacart's Enterprise Solutions team is building a first-of-its-kind business: embedding directly with enterprise retail and CPG partners to design, sell, and deliver AI-powered solutions at scale. We are a small, senior, field-first pod — part startup, part consultancy — defining the playbook as we go.

About the Job

• Embed with enterprise retail customers and partners to understand their technical environments, data systems, and business workflows.
• Design, build, and deploy AI and agentic solutions tailored to each customer's specific infrastructure and needs, across Instacart's full platform suite.
• Extend, adapt, and integrate Instacart's core AI capabilities to fit customer ecosystems, even when those systems are undocumented or non-standard.
• Maintain a close working relationship with R&D: participate in product reviews, flag platform gaps encountered in the field, and propose concrete changes that would make the platform work better for enterprise customers.
• Collaborate closely with the AI Solutions Architect to translate domain requirements and architecture into working software.
• Serve as the primary technical point of contact for customers during implementation engagements.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a demonstrated ability to write and ship production-quality code.
• Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs, function calling, tool use, agent frameworks, or RAG pipelines—you have shipped something agentic that real users depended on.
• Proficiency in Python or another scripting/backend language commonly used in data-intensive environments.
• Proven ability to integrate with external systems and adapt to undocumented or non-standard environments.