Senior Software Engineer I — Agentic Analytics
About the role
Overview
About the Role
We are currently seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Agentic Analytics Platform team — the team responsible for the AI-for-Data charter inside Instacart's Data Infrastructure org. You'll design and build LLM-powered systems that transform how data practitioners (data scientists, data engineers, analysts, PMs) interact with data at Instacart — from natural-language data access and AI-assisted SQL, to automated metadata generation, to embedding intelligent capabilities across our broader data infra ecosystem. This is a hands-on role at the frontier of applied AI inside a large, modern data stack.
About the Team
The mission of the Instacart Self-Serve organization is to improve the productivity of data practitioners through easy-to-use, self-serve tools. Agentic Analytics is the team chartered with bringing AI and LLMs into that mission — broadly. We own the systems, evals, and product surfaces that make AI-for-Data real at Instacart, and we partner across Data Infra to embed AI capabilities wherever they create the most leverage. It's a small team with an outsized charter, defining what "AI for the data org" looks like in production at company scale.
About the Job
- You will be part of a small, ambitious team with a large amount of ownership and surface area, contributing directly to the AI-for-Data charter at Instacart.
- You will build LLM-powered systems end-to-end — retrieval/grounding over internal metadata and code, agentic workflows, evals and quality systems, and the product surfaces that put these tools in front of internal users.
- You will have the opportunity to suggest and drive new initiatives — the roadmap is still being shaped and there's real room for contribution.
- You will collaborate closely with other engineers on the team and contribute to a strong engineering culture around applied AI rigor (evals, observability, safety, cost).
- You will work closely with Data Science, ML, Product Engineering, and other Data Infra teams to identify high-leverage AI applications and translate them into reliable, production-grade systems.
About You
Minimum Qualifications
- Self-motivation and an enjoyment for a startup environment, with comfort operating in ambiguity
- A strong sense of ownership and a builder's instinct — you've shipped real systems, not just prototypes
- Strong backend engineering skills in Python, with experience building production services
- Hands-on experience with applied LLM systems — RAG, agentic workflows, prompt engineering, evals, or