Sr Decision Scientist II (Scalability)

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.

Overview

About the Role - As a Senior Decision Scientist, you will be responsible for understanding and improving the quality of Instacart’s online grocery business. You will play a key role in building and maintaining business-critical datasets. You will help set up scalable monitoring systems for analysts to leverage which enable them to understand our business performance with greater efficiency. Your work will also entail supporting cross-functional data needs to facilitate improvements across multiple fronts.

About the Team - The Platform Excellence Operations (PEO) team is dedicated to improving the quality of Instacart’s online grocery experience for our customers, shoppers, and retailers. The analytics team focuses on identifying, understanding, and eliminating defects in the online grocery experience by analyzing and interpreting operational data. The team ensures that stakeholders have a consistent understanding of why business performance is changing and advocates for improving poor experiences that may be overlooked. You’ll be part of a dynamic cross-functional team that collaborates closely with stakeholders to provide critical data insights to enhance our operations and overall customer experience.

As part of the Scalability & Enablement Pillar within PEO Analytics, you tackle meta-level problems related to how analysts and business stakeholders interact with data through the data lifecycle. Your goal is to provide access to stable and accurate data that serves hundreds of users. You focus on understanding how to improve the efficiency of core data functions like monitoring, interpretation and analysis; working to implement solutions that help resolve those challenges.

About the Job

Analytics Engineering

• Work with cross-functional stakeholders in Data Science, Operations, and R&D to create 'source of truth' datasets.
• Maintenance of data pipelines to minimize operational disruption
• Design new data schemas matching business needs and link them to existing data for analysis
• Support the integration of 3rd party data into analytics-ready Instacart data

Improving Analytics Efficiency

• Define structured frameworks to measure and track metrics across multiple domains
• Independently create and execute analytical plans to identify, understand, and reduce known data life-cycle problems
• Help elevate the team’s technical acumen through mentorship and by initiating learning opportunities

Strategy

• Approach problems with a solutions-oriented mindset by developing business cases with clear logical narratives backed by data that result in actionable recommendations
• Influence cross-functional stakeholders and build out operational analytics capabilities in new domains
• Support alignment conversations related to domains, swimlanes, and skills with cross-functional stakeholders
• Provide thought leadership within Operations org when planning future strategic initiatives to increase output of data insights
• Support creation of scalability roadmaps during planning

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in an analytics engineering related role (e.g. analytics engineering, data engineering, data science, etc)
• Familiarity with: Snowflake/Databricks/BigQuery or similar data warehouses, DBT/Apache Airflow or similar orchestration tools, Github, and Jira
• Proficiency with Python for automation, statistical analysis
• Experience building and owning key analytics datasets across multiple domains
• Experience with change management for high use datasets with downstream dependencies
• Strong problem solving skills - able to quickly debug anomalies in performance metrics, form hypothesis for investigation, and draw conclusions by conducting nuanced analysis
• Ability to aggregate and synthesize large amounts of data and leverage a deep understanding of how analysts would interact with those datasets
• Strong stakeholder management skills - able to define stakeholder needs and concerns. Initiates methods to engage them, build trust, and propel ambiguous projects forward
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to lead meetings and synthesize complex topics by creating compelling narratives for various stakeholders
• Experience working directly with product/engineering teams on scalable process solutions
• Effective prioritization and ability to balance quality and speed in a time constrained environment
• Ability to work independently with a strong sense of ownership

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience using AI/LLMs to improve capabilities in analytics processes
• Experience mentoring and coaching other data team member
• Experience utilizing custom internal tools and frameworks to deploy data solutions

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