
Senior Data Scientist – Shopping Experience, Search
Instacart
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Remote
Location: California • Connecticut • United States
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Salary
💰 $161,000 - $204,500 per year
Job Level
Tech Stack
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