Senior Operations Research Scientist

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

We're looking for outstanding operations research (OR) scientists to join our fast moving team. We work on a range of interesting and challenging problems, from making sure orders are fulfilled efficiently and on-time to helping customers decide what to buy. Machine learning and Operations Research are at the heart of this effort and an essential ingredient in Instacart's aggressive growth plan and vision for the future.

We love operations research scientists who are motivated not only by researching new solutions, but by owning the problem and implementation end to end. There is tremendous opportunity in front of us, and joining now gives you a chance to grow your career and interests as we succeed.

ABOUT THE JOB

• You will work on real-time fulfillment systems and build/code scalable solutions to continuously evolving and incredibly challenging logistics problems.
• You will be dedicated to a small cross-discipline product team, with tremendous ownership and responsibility for managing things directly.
• You will be an active member of an internal community of operations research scientists and machine learning engineers sharing learnings, best practices and research across many domains.
• You will ship high quality solutions with a sense of urgency and speed.
• You will work closely with engineers, product managers, other teams, and both internal and external stakeholders, owning a large part of the process from problem understanding to shipping the solution.
• You will have the freedom to suggest and drive organization-wide initiatives.
• You will mentor others on best practices for design and implementation of cutting-edge OR solutions.

ABOUT YOU

• Bachelor's degree (M.S./PhD preferred) in Operations Research, Applied Mathematics or a related field
• 4+ years of industry experience using operations research to solve real-world problems
• Expertise in mathematical optimization, and implementing scalable tailored solution approaches and heuristics to solve optimization problems
• Experience building real-time optimization engines and predictive modeling. Direct experience working on balancing supply and demand in a complex marketplace is a big plus.
• 3+ years experience in building models and developing scalable algorithms for machine learning, mathematical programming and simulation
• 2+ years experience with developing heuristic methods, problem decomposition and optimization using PuLP, Gurobi, CPLEX or related tools
• 2+ years experience in handling data and writing production applications using Python (pandas, numpy etc), R, SQL
• A blend of operations research, data mining, predictive modeling, statistical analysis and people knowledge that lets you jump into a fast paced environment and contribute from day one

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Accommodations & Accessibility

At Instacart, we strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you need assistance submitting an application through our career site due to a disability, please submit an Accommodations Request Form and someone from our team will reach out soon to see how we may be able to assist.