Senior Data Scientist

We're transforming the grocery industryAt 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.OverviewThis is a general posting for multiple Senior Data Science roles open across our 4-sided marketplace. Roles are open at both the L5 (Senior Data Scientist I) and L6 (Senior Data Scientist II) levels. 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 roles/teams you’ll join. At the bottom of this posting, you’ll find a breakdown of the currently open roles.About the JobOwn 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 YouMinimum Qualifications5+ 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 QualificationsAwareness 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 RolesAI for Analytics | Sr. Data Scientist II (L6)Instacart is developing AI-powered systems to accelerate analytical work and enable self-serve analytics at scale, with a goal of 2x-ing the number of features launched by end of 2026. As a Senior Data Scientist II, you’ll own product strategy and AI expertise—identifying high-impact opportunity areas and deploying AI and ML systems in production settings. This is a senior cross-functional leadership role: you’ll shape the product roadmap, ruthlessly prioritize across competing stakeholders, and set the analytical direction for how Instacart’s data experts and AI systems work together.Order Experiences (Search) | Sr. Data Scientist I (L5)The Order Experiences (Search) team is focused on making it fast and effortless for customers to find the right items and complete their order with confidence. As a Senior Data Scientist, you’ll own the analytics and experimentation strategy that powers how we interpret customer intent and surface the most relevant results—driving search conversion, order rate, and GTV. You’ll partner closely with Product, Engineering, and ML to shape the roadmap for search relevance and ranking quality, running experiments across retrieval, ranking, and search UX while connecting offline model evaluation to real-world business outcomes.Ecosystems | Sr. Data Scientist II (L6)The Ecosystems team tackles some of Instacart’s most strategic macro-level analytical challenges, including quantifying the impact of economic trends, competitive dynamics, and seasonality on core business metrics. As a Senior Data Scientist II, you’ll own time-series forecasting for key business outcomes, develop measurement framewor