Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Caper

We're transforming the grocery industry

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.

About the Role

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Caper (an Instacart company), you will contribute to redefining the in-store shopping experience by leveraging cutting-edge technology and AI-driven insights. You'll work at the core of our smart cart experience, designing and fine-tuning scalable models that seamlessly integrate sensor data to deliver effortless and intuitive experiences for our customers. Collaborating with cross-functional teams, including computer vision, hardware, and front-end engineers, you’ll tackle complex challenges like object tracking and recognition while helping us perfect and evolve our sensor ecosystem.

In this role, you will:

• Build and improve core weight sensing models to enhance shopping cart accuracy and usability.
• Develop robust sensor fusion models by integrating multiple sensor inputs.
• Improve signal quality and ensure consistency across sensor data streams.
• Design and execute experiments to generate actionable sensor data.
• Deploy machine learning models on edge devices, such as the Nvidia Jetson platform.
• Create infrastructure to collect, process, and store sensor data efficiently.

About the Team

The AI and Computer Vision (CV) team at Caper plays an integral role in advancing Instacart’s mission to provide retailers with seamless, AI-enriched shopping solutions. Our diverse team, spread across multiple time zones, collaborates effectively on a wide variety of exciting projects that power our smart carts. From exploring novel machine learning techniques to refining edge computing solutions, our goal is to revolutionize the retail experience for merchants and their customers alike.

About You

Minimum Qualifications:

• Master’s or Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, or related fields.
• Strong problem-solving, analytical, and experimental skills.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with a track record of productive cross-functional collaboration.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, C++, or Java/Kotlin.
• Strong experience with data science tools (e.g., SQL, Pandas) and machine learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn).
• Hands-on experience with embedded AI devices, notably the Nvidia Jetson platform.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 3+ years of experience developing and deploying machine learning models and implementing sensor fusion in production environments.
• Experience working with large language models (LLMs) or vision-language models (VLMs).
• Familiarity with A/B testing methodologies and experimentation in industrial environments.
• Exposure to hardware product development, onboard edge computing, and signal processing challenges.
• Strong track record of translating research into production while maintaining an iterative and fast-paced workflow.
• Proactive self-starter with the ability to independently identify problems and drive solutions.