Instacart
Forward Deployed Engineer
About this role
Instacart seeks a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with enterprise retail customers, understand their technical environments, and build and deploy AI-powered agentic solutions tailored to their specific infrastructure. You'll act as the technical bridge between Instacart's R&D team and real-world customer implementations, combining hands-on engineering with customer-facing collaboration.
What you'll do
- Embed with enterprise retail customers to understand their technical environments, data systems, and business workflows
- Design, build, and deploy AI and agentic solutions customized to each customer's infrastructure and needs
- Extend and integrate Instacart's AI capabilities to fit customer ecosystems, including undocumented or non-standard systems
- Serve as primary technical contact during implementation engagements and maintain close relationships with customers
- Collaborate with R&D to flag platform gaps, propose improvements, and inform product evolution based on field learnings
- Work with AI Solutions Architect to translate domain requirements into production software
What they're looking for
- LLM APIs and agentic AI frameworks (function calling, tool use, RAG pipelines)
- Python or backend scripting languages for data-intensive environments
- Enterprise data integration and API integration (legacy systems, schema mismatches, auth complexity)
- Retail and e-commerce system fundamentals
- Customer-facing technical communication and stakeholder management
- Systems integration and enterprise software implementation
- Production-quality code development and shipping
- Problem-solving in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
Opens the official application on the employer’s site. No login required.
Instacart
Instacart builds a grocery delivery marketplace and enterprise AI solutions that optimize shopping experiences through machine learning, pricing, recommendations, and generative AI. The company is hiring PhD-level machine learning researchers, systems engineers, and forward-deployed engineers to develop scalable AI systems and deploy agentic solutions for retail and CPG partners.
- Website
- instacart.com
Likely interview questions
- Walk us through a time you shipped an LLM or agentic AI solution—what was the use case and what real user problems did it solve?
- Describe your experience integrating with messy enterprise systems. What was the most challenging data or API integration you've handled?