# Senior Applied Scientist II, Ads Optimization at Instacart

- Company: Instacart
- What the company does: Order same-day delivery or pickup from more than 300 retailers and grocers. Download the Instacart app or start shopping online now with Instacart to get groceries, alcohol, home essentials, and more delivered to you in as fast as 1 hour or select curbside... Backed by General Catalyst, Khosla and Kleiner Perkins.
- Company website: https://www.instacart.com/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Senior
- Location: United States - Remote
- Work setup: Remote
- Posted: 2026-04-08
- Apply by: 2026-10-12
- Apply: https://instacart.careers/job/?gh_jid=7793391
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/instacart-senior-applied-scientist-ii-ads-optimization/

## About the role

The Advertiser Optimization team is the decision-making engine of Instacart's $1B+ ads business. We own the systems responsible for Bidding, Pacing, Budgeting, and Targeting: converting stated advertiser goals into real-time auction actions. Our mission is to maximize realized Advertiser Value by deciding when to participate, how much to bid, and how fast to spend, all while balancing User Experience and Platform Revenue.

## What they're looking for

- Graduate degree (Masters or PhD) in operations research, applied mathematics, control systems, computational economics, or a related quantitative field
- 8+ years of experience building and deploying optimization or control systems in production environments (not just research prototypes)
- Strong foundation in at least two of: feedback control theory (PID, MPC), convex and stochastic optimization, auction theory and mechanism design, dynamic programming
- Proficiency in one of the following languages: Go, Java, C++ for production systems and Python for data analysis and offline pipelines
- Demonstrated ability to translate mathematical formulations into production code that runs at scale (millions of decisions per day, sub-100ms latency constraints)

Tags: Machine Learning