Senior Software Engineer, AI Productivity
About the role
Overview
Instacart's AI Productivity team builds AI-powered platforms and tools that help our engineers and operators move faster, reduce toil, and deliver higher-quality experiences for customers, shoppers, retailers, and brand partners.
As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you will design, build, and operate production systems that bring large language models and intelligent automation into everyday workflows across Instacart. You'll partner closely with product, developer platform, ML platform, security, and data teams to ship reliable, secure, and measurable solutions that improve developer velocity and operational efficiency.
You'll join a collaborative group of approximately 10 engineers who value ownership, iteration, and pragmatic problem solving. If you enjoy rolling up your sleeves, navigating ambiguity, and turning cutting-edge AI into real, scalable products, this role is for you. This position is remote-friendly across Canada.
About the Job
- Design, build, and operate AI-powered services and internal applications—such as code and test assistants, knowledge search, and intelligent chat workflows—that improve developer and operator productivity at scale.
- Implement robust back-end services in languages such as Python, Go, or Java; integrate foundation models via APIs and open-source frameworks; and apply techniques like retrieval-augmented generation and vector search where appropriate.
- Own projects end-to-end, including requirements, technical design, implementation, testing, deployment, observability, on-call participation, and iterative improvements focused on reliability, latency, and cost efficiency.
- Partner with Developer Platform, ML Platform, Security, and Legal to ensure safe and compliant AI usage, including data governance, guardrails, content/prompt safety, and privacy-by-design.
- Define and track success with clear metrics (e.g., adoption, task completion time, DORA/SPACE signals, satisfaction), and run experiments and A/B tests to validate impact and guide iteration.
- Create and maintain shared tooling, libraries, and documentation that raise the bar for applied AI development across Instacart, and mentor teammates on best practices in this fast-paced, evolving space.
About You
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production services.
- 3+ years of hands-on experience in at least one of: Python, Go, or Java.
- 2+ years of experience integrating ML or LLM capabilities into production systems.