Blogsby GlyphSep 3
Agentic Machine Learning Modeling at Instacart
Tilman Drerup, Moe Moazzami, Shih-Ting Lin, Greg Reda (and many more) Introduction At Instacart, artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the way our machine learning engineers operate.
Instacart Tech the engineering blog of Instacart: latest posts and feed
Instacart · Engineering blog · 1 a month · 10 posts since Feb 26, 2026 · Quiet
Jul 14
Blueberry: Force Multiplier For The On-Call Engineer
How we built a Slack-native on-call reasoning harness at Instacart that shortens time to first insight, speeds up theory testing, and turns tribal knowledge into reusable infrastructure.
Jul 1
Variance Reduction Below the Randomization Grain
Sergio Camelo, Caitlin Kearns, Matias Cersosimo, and Tilman Drerup As artificial intelligence increases the velocity of engineering and science teams, experimental throughput is set to become a bottleneck for many product decisions.
Jun 29
Leveraging PyFixest for High-Cardinality Marketplace Modeling at Instacart
Benjamin S. Knight Scaling Marketplace experiments requires specialized statistical techniques. We examine why standard ordinary least squares regression (OLS) becomes computationally intractable when controlling for high-cardinality...
Jun 2
Semantic IDs: Product Understanding at Scale
Key Contributors: Shrikar Archak, Karuna Ahuja, Soroush Sobhkhiz, Marko Avdalovic, Xiyu Wang, JiChao Zhang, Hao Yan, Chris Hartley Introduction Operating a grocery catalog at Instacart’s scale means managing millions of products across...
Jun 2
From Scoring to Spelling: Rebuilding Ads Retrieval at Instacart
Key Contributors: Karuna Ahuja, Marko Avdalovic, Soroush Sobhkhiz, Shrikar Archak, Xiyu Wang, Ji Chao Zhang, Hao Yan Introduction Every time a user opens Instacart, they see product recommendations: on the retailer home page, in search...
May 22
How AI Changes the Role of Applied Scientists
Levi Boxell, Tilman Drerup, Alexandr Lenk The Economics Team at Instacart is an applied science team that operates at the intersection of machine learning engineering and economics.
May 14
Scaling Personalized Marketing for Multi-Tenant Commerce Platforms
TL;DR Background: Marketing Across Marketplace and Storefront Instacart operates across two distinct commerce experiences: Instacart Marketplace, our first-party consumer marketplace Storefront Pro, our white-label e-commerce platform for...
May 4
Empowering Carrot Ads with Domain Adaptive Learning
Authors: Trey Zhong, Xiyu Wang Contributors: Joseph Haraldson, Sharad Gupta, Sarah Lamacchia Introduction Carrot Ads is Instacart’s omnichannel retail media solution that allows retailer partners to build and scale their own advertising...
Feb 26
Our Early Journey to Transform Instacart’s Discovery Recommendations with LLMs
Key Contributors: Moein Hasani, Hamidreza Shahidi, Trace Levinson, Guanghua Shu Introduction At Instacart, we are laser-focused on improving the user experience by making shopping feel easy, engaging, and personalized.
About this blog
Search, ads, ML and data platforms at Instacart.
Posts per week, last 26 weeks
1 a month over the last six months (or since the feed's oldest post)
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Writes about
AI and agents (3), Research (2), Reliability and performance (2) in the last six months.