Instacart

Senior Data Scientist – Shopping Experience, Search

Instacart

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Remote

Location: CaliforniaConnecticutUnited States

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Salary

💰 $161,000 - $204,500 per year

Job Level

About the role

  • Own core Search metrics and funnels end to end (e.g., query → impression → engagement → cart adds), including defining guardrails, monitoring performance across platforms and segments, and diagnosing conversion gaps.
  • Design, run, and interpret experiments across ranking, retrieval, and search UX (e.g., relevance model changes, query understanding, result layouts), turning ambiguous or conflicting outcomes into crisp, data-driven recommendations.
  • Partner with Product, Engineering, and ML to prioritize opportunities, size impact, and influence the roadmap for relevance, quality, and latency improvements that unlock measurable business outcomes.
  • Build deep diagnostic analyses by query class, price point, surface, and customer lifecycle to pinpoint where and why Search underperforms and specify concrete changes that will move key outcomes.
  • Connect offline model evaluation with online and business metrics by collaborating with ML partners on evaluation design, ensuring model changes reliably improve end-user experience—not just offline scores.
  • Improve data quality, instrumentation, and metric definitions for Search so that teams can reason about performance with clarity, consistency, and speed.

Requirements

  • 5+ years of experience in data science or product analytics, with a track record of impact on consumer-facing products.
  • Advanced SQL proficiency, including complex joins and window functions, working with large-scale datasets in modern data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift).
  • Proficiency in Python or R for analysis, experimentation, and modeling.
  • Hands-on experience designing and analyzing A/B tests end to end, including metric selection, power and sample sizing, covariate adjustment, and decision-making under uncertainty.
  • Demonstrated ability to define success metrics, decompose ambiguous product problems, and deliver clear, opinionated recommendations to Product and Engineering partners.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to tailor complex analyses for both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative field (e.g., Statistics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Economics, Engineering) or equivalent practical experience.
  • Comfort using modern AI tooling (e.g., Claude, code assistants, PromptQL) to accelerate analysis, experimentation, and communication while exercising strong judgment on quality and reliability.
Benefits
  • health insurance
  • retirement plans
  • paid time off
  • flexible work arrangements
  • professional development
  • bonuses
  • stock options
  • equipment allowances
  • wellness programs
Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools
data scienceproduct analyticsSQLPythonRA/B testingmetric selectiondata analysismodel evaluationdata quality
Soft Skills
communicationproblem-solvingcollaborationanalytical thinkingdecision-makingrecommendation deliverytailoring analysesjudgment