Instacart is seeking a Senior Decision Scientist to join our team. You will be responsible for understanding and enhancing the quality of our online grocery marketplace and fulfillment operations. You will translate data-driven insights into impactful actions that drive measurable business outcomes through advanced technical analyses and modeling.
What You'll Do
- Conduct rigorous analyses grounded in a deep understanding of marketplace dynamics, controlling for confounding factors to ensure insights are accurate and actionable.
- Leverage advanced statistical techniques including causal inference and regression modeling to isolate true drivers of fulfillment quality.
- Balance short-term operational needs with long-term strategic planning for quality improvement and sustainable growth.
- Provide thought leadership when planning future strategic initiatives to maximize the impact of data-driven insights.
- Build data pipelines that monitor and analyze key marketplace and retailer quality issues.
- Develop automated workflows that streamline issue detection, root cause analysis, and recommendations for operational teams.
- Build and maintain data models and pipelines.
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years of experience in analytics, data science, or decision science roles.
- Familiarity with Snowflake/Databricks/BigQuery or similar data warehouses.
- Familiarity with DBT/Apache Airflow or similar orchestration tools, Github, and Jira.
- Proficiency with Python/SQL to perform statistical analysis, predictive modeling, large language modeling, and automation.
- Ability to deal with ambiguity; a self-starter who can quickly respond to problems independently.
- Experience building and maintaining DBT models for analytics use cases, including managing downstream dependencies.
- Strong problem-solving skills to quickly debug anomalies, form hypotheses, and draw conclusions through nuanced analysis.
- Effective prioritization and ability to balance quality and speed in a time-constrained environment.
- Ability to work independently with a strong sense of ownership.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to lead meetings and synthesize complex topics for various stakeholders.
- Experience working directly with product and engineering teams.
Nice to Have
- Experience designing and analyzing experiments (A/B tests, randomized controlled trials) to measure causal impact.
- Understanding of multi-sided marketplace dynamics and the analytical challenges of balancing supply, demand, and platform economics.
- Familiarity with LLM performance metrics, quality assessment techniques, and best practices for prompt engineering or model evaluation.
- Experience mentoring and coaching other data team members.
Technical Stack
- Languages & Querying: Python, SQL
- Data Warehouses: Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery
- Orchestration & Modeling: DBT, Apache Airflow
- Tools: Github, Jira
Team & Environment
This role is part of the Marketplace & Retailer Pillar within Platform Excellence Operations (PEO) Analytics.
Benefits & Compensation
- Compensation: $143,000 — $151,000 CAD + equity
- New hire equity grant
- Annual refresh equity grants
- Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits
Work Mode
This is a remote position open to candidates in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. We operate with a Flex First team approach to work.
Instacart is an equal opportunity employer.
