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 similar. You've worked on an LLM-powered system in production (or close to it) and have opinions on what makes them reliable.
• Working knowledge of common data infrastructure technologies (Python, Airflow, Snowflake, dbt) in a production environment
• Strong knowledge of SQL
• Experience working with a large codebase on a cross-functional team
• An ability to balance a sense of urgency with shipping high quality and pragmatic solutions
• 5+ years of working experience in a similar field/environment

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with retrieval systems, vector stores, or grounding LLMs over structured/unstructured enterprise data
• Familiarity with eval frameworks and quality systems for LLM-powered products
• Experience building developer tools or internal tools for technical users
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, OR equivalent work experience

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