Senior Data Scientist

Overview
This is a general posting for multiple Senior 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 role/team you’ll join. At the bottom of this posting, you'll find a breakdown of the currently open roles.

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 products.
• Build simulations to project the 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

• 5+ years of experience working in a quantitative role at a product company or a research organization.
• Ability to run rigorous experiments and generate 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 a dynamic environment, and a growth mindset 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 (e.g., Product, Engineering) at a senior level.
• MS/PhD in Statistics, Economics, Applied Mathematics, or a related field.

Currently Opened Roles

Fraud - The Fraud Data Science role covers shopper and customer fraud, abuse, and identity, partnering closely with Operations, Product, and Machine Learning teams. The ideal candidate brings a strong product sense, an adversarial mindset, and comfort navigating ambiguous problems where growth and profit tradeoffs demand nuanced judgment. They are a self-starter who identifies opportunities not just within fraud, but across the business wherever abuse may occur.

Caper - Join our team where you'll tackle genuinely challenging problems at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, and data science—working to understand, measure, and improve smart-cart basket accuracy while reducing friction in the shopping experience. This role is an opportunity to shape the future of AI-powered grocery transactions by partnering with engineering (CV, ML, backend, and frontend) and product teams to build systems that directly impact how customers shop and checkout. If you're passionate about solving hard problems at the frontier of retail AI and want to see your work translate directly into real-world impact, this is the role for you.

Marketing - We're seeking a Senior Marketing Data Scientist to drive optimization and strategic partnership across our paid marketing channels. You'll build sophisticated attribution models, develop predictive algorithms for campaign performance, budget allocation and translate complex data into actionable recommendations that maximize ROI across platforms like Google Ads, Meta, and programmatic display. This role requires deep expertise in statistical modeling, A/B testing, and causal inference, combined with the ability to partner cross-functionally with marketing, product, finance, and marketing analytics teams.

Payments - This team is responsible for managing and optimizing Instacart's Payments Platform, a critical lever for profitability and growth. This product DS role uses advanced analytics and rigorous experimentation to drive strategic initiatives, including optimizing payment costs, improving the payment experience, and unlocking growth via new partnerships. Success requires close collaboration with PM, Engineering, Fraud Analytics, and Strategic Partners.

Retailer Storefronts - This team delivers end-to-end tools that enable retailers to launch, operate, and grow their owned and operated digital storefronts. This role will be a product DS role that partners closely with the product and engineer teams for new product feature development and retailer expansions.

Ecosystem - We are seeking a Senior Data Scientist to join our Growth & Ecosystems team. This position is designed for a senior data scientist who operates with a high degree of ownership and influence. The role focuses on high-impact, cross-functional analytics that inform company-wide strategy and decision-making. You will partner closely with senior leadership, finance, and other horizontal data science and analytics teams to understand growth dynamics, evaluate strategic tradeoffs, and develop analytical frameworks that guide the business.

Shopping Marketplace - We're hiring a Data Scientist to work at the intersection of Data Science and Machine Learning in the item ranking space. You'll translate business problems into model requirements, prototype new ML models to validate ideas (such as uplift models), and create dashboards to measure production model performance. The ideal candidate is comfortable communicating technical concepts to cross-functional partners and can balance analytical rigor with speed. You should be self-driven, able to identify optimization opportunities in existing models, and know when deep technical investigation is needed versus when to move forward with available insights.

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