As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer II on the Ads Response Prediction team, you will lead the design and development of core ML models that power Instacart's ads ecosystem. This is a research-leaning role focused on theoretical problem formulation, training methodology, and model quality rather than infrastructure or full-stack engineering. You will tackle fundamental challenges in pCTR modeling such as mitigating selection bias, position bias, and optimizer's curse in training data, improving model calibration across surfaces and domains, and advancing our multi-task learning and sequence modeling capabilities. You will also have the opportunity to shape our next-generation foundation model approach for ads ranking and contribute to cutting-edge retrieval systems like TIGER (Transformer Index for Generative Recommenders), Semantic ID and domain language models.

The Ads Response Prediction team owns all systems, algorithms and ML models to ensure a relevant and engaging Ads experience to customers of all the platforms powered by Instacart. This includes search and exploration retrieval systems, sequential modeling and generative retrieval systems for next interaction recommendations, LLM integrations, relevance models, pCTR models, bidding models and incrementality models. The team optimizes for an efficient marketplace to ensure delightful customer shopping experience, desirable advertiser business outcome and Instacart Ads revenue.

The team has strong ML infrastructure and MLOps support, including Delta/DBT-Spark data pipelines, Ray-based distributed training, and automated model deployment. This means you can focus your energy on advancing modeling science rather than building infrastructure.

About the Job

• Lead research and development of pCTR and conversion prediction models, with a focus on improving calibration, reducing training data biases (selection bias, position bias, optimizer's curse), and advancing model accuracy across Instacart's ads surfaces.
• Design and implement debiasing techniques such as Mixed Negative Sampling (MNS), Inverse Propensity Weighting (IPW), counterfactual risk minimization, and calibration methods (Platt scaling, isotonic regression) to address systematic prediction biases.
• Contribute to the next-generation Multi-Domain Multi-Task (MDMT) model architecture, incorporating innovations like Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), Transformer layers for sequential user behavior, and LoRA adaptors for scalable domain fine-tuning.
• Drive sequence modeling initiatives including the TIGER generative retrieval system and Semantic ID representation learning, expanding their application across ads surfaces such as Product Details, Search and other placements.
• Collaborate with the broader ML community in the company on the path toward Foundation Models using autoregressive user behavior prediction.
• Formulate and scope ambiguous modeling problems from first principles. Translate business observations (e.g., overcalibration patterns, cold-start underperformance) into well-defined ML research directions with clear evaluation criteria.
• Publish and present findings internally. Contribute to the team's culture of technical rigor through design reviews, paper sharing, and experiment retrospectives.
• Graduate degree (Masters or PhD) in machine learning, statistics, computer science, information retrieval, or a closely related field.

About You

, <li>Experience in ads ranking or auction-based systems (pCTR, bid optimization, ROAS feedback loops, marketplace dynamics).</li>

At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.

Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we're building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you're ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.

Instacart is a Flex First team

There's no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work-whether it's from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop-while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.

</div><h1>Overview</h1>, <p class="p1">#LI-Remote</p><div class="content-pay-transparency"><div class="pay-input"><div class="description"><p>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.</p>

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 read more about our benefits offerings here.

For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.

</div><div class="title">CA, NY, CT, NJ</div><div class="pay-range">$240,000-$253,500 USD</div></div><div class="pay-input"><div class="title">WA</div><div class="pay-range">$230,000-$243,000 USD</div></div><div