Senior Operations Research Scientist

Job Description

Founded in 2012, Instacart is a leader in North American online groceries and one of the fastest growing companies in e-commerce. Instacart's same-day delivery and pickup services bring everyday essentials and fresh groceries to consumers in the U.S. and Canada in as fast as an hour. At Instacart, we believe that great people are the ingredients for success. We like to think that we are like a potluck, everyone brings something new, different and flavorful to the table. Our mix of thoughtful, inventive and neighborly employees work together to deliver our common goal, to make grocery shopping effortless, and give valuable time back to our customers. We believe that just as meals are best shared together, success is best shared together. If this excites you, then Instacart just might be the place for you. Welcome home.
Want to learn more? Lettuce show you the way!
We're looking for experienced operations research scientists to join our fast moving team. We work on a range of interesting and challenging problems, from making sure deliveries are efficient 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 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.
Your day to day...

• You will work on real-time fulfillment systems and come up with 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 data scientists, 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.

You have...

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Operations Research, Applied Mathematics or a related field
• 4+ years of industry experience using operations research to solve real-world problems (2+ years with a PhD)
• 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 bug 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

Want to see a slice of life at Instacart? Checkout #tasteofinstacart on Instagram and LinkedIn

• Tech Blog
• Instacart News

Instacart is committed to fostering a diverse work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As we highly value diversity in our current and future employees, we do not discriminate (including in our hiring and promotion practices) on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression , sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any other characteristic protected by law.