Senior Software Engineer II, AI Labs & Foundations

Qualifications: Proven senior software engineer who has built, shipped, and operated production systems at scale. You make architectural calls, own what you build, and deliver through ambiguity. Hands-on experience with AI or ML in production. You've shipped LLM-powered features or integrated foundation model APIs into a live product, demonstrating the necessary expertise at the intersection of robust software engineering and deep production ML. Experience owning services end-to-end, including CI/CD, automated testing, observability (logging, metrics, tracing), and on-call participation. Strong communicator who partners well across disciplines - you want to get to the right answer, not just defend the first one. Excitement and ability to leverage cutting-edge development tools, including AI assistance (e.g., Copilot, Cursor, Claude), to maximize velocity. Preferred Qualifications: 5 to 8+ years of industry experience. A track record of 0-to-1 work taking unconventional ideas from prototype through rapid iteration to production. Experience building conversational agents, multi-turn dialogue systems, or agentic LLM applications. Experience with STT/TTS or natural language interfaces, LLM fine tuning, ML transfer learning, model training and the vocabulary of measurement of model performance. Experience with embedding systems, vector search, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, or Elasticsearch). Experience with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP), containers (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes). Experience with event-driven or distributed systems (e.g., Kafka). Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership within cross-functional teams. #LI-Remote Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here . Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please rea d more about our benefits offerings here . For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below. CA, NY, CT, NJ $230,000 — $242,000 USD WA $220,000 — $232,000 USD OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI $211,000 — $222,000 USD All other states $192,000 — $202,000 USD