Forward Deployed Engineer

About this role

Instacart is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with enterprise retail and CPG partners, designing and deploying AI-powered solutions tailored to their technical environments. You'll bridge Instacart's R&D team with customer realities, building agentic AI systems that integrate into complex, legacy enterprise ecosystems while serving as the primary technical point of contact.

What you'll do

• Embed with enterprise customers to understand their technical infrastructure, data systems, and business workflows
• Design and deploy AI and agentic solutions customized to each customer's specific environment and needs
• Integrate and adapt Instacart's core AI capabilities to fit customer ecosystems, including undocumented or non-standard systems
• Collaborate with R&D to identify platform gaps, propose improvements, and inform product evolution based on field learnings
• Work with AI Solutions Architects to translate requirements into working software
• Serve as primary technical contact for customers during implementation engagements

What they're looking for

• 10+ years software engineering with production-quality code experience
• LLM APIs, function calling, agent frameworks, and RAG pipelines
• Python or backend/scripting languages for data-intensive environments
• Enterprise data integration with legacy systems and messy APIs
• Customer-facing technical consulting and stakeholder management
• Retail and e-commerce system fundamentals
• Technical communication and cross-team translation
• Comfort with ambiguous, fast-moving environments

Benefits

• Flex First work model with remote flexibility and in-person community events
• Opportunity to shape emerging AI solutions in retail at scale
• Direct impact on enterprise customer success and product direction
• Collaborative startup-like environment with senior technical team
• Exposure to cutting-edge AI and agentic technologies