AI Automation Lead I

Were transforming the grocery industry

At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.

Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and were building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If youre ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.

Instacart is a Flex First team

Theres no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether its from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.

About the Role

We are looking for an AI Automation Lead to design and deliver intelligent automation solutions that make complex business processes simple, scalable, and reliable. Youll work closely with our Commercial teams (Sales, Partnerships, Operations) to build tools that enable non-technical users to get insights, take action, and save time through AI-driven workflows.

This role is ideal for someone with 2-4 years of experience in data engineering, automation, or platform engineering who wants to work at the intersection of AI, integrations, and business enablement.

About the Team 

The Commercial Scaled Intelligence (CSI) team is an AI-first team dedicated to delivering actionable commercial insights and scalable automation to drive revenue growth and operational efficiency across the company. The team focuses on intelligence generation, predictive analytics, and workflow automation to enable data-driven decision-making and optimize commercial performance.

About the Job

• Create AI tools that can grasp and respond to questions in common language. These tools should offer insights and warnings, compile reports, and improve work tasks such as managing tickets, planning campaigns, and compiling reports.
• Design and operate integrations across internal systems and third-party SaaS (REST/GraphQL APIs, webhooks, OAuth, JWT), with attention to reliability (rate limits, retries, idempotency).
• Develop and orchestrate multi-step AI workflows using frameworks like LangChain or LangGraph, with human-in-the-loop approvals where appropriate.
• Ensure AI safety and reliability by incorporating guardrails, evaluation frameworks, fallback logic, RBAC, audit trails, and PII protections.
• Build and maintain data pipelines (SQL, Python, dbt) that power AI agents and ensure reliability, observability, and performance.
• Create lightweight UIs and self-serve experiences (e.g. Slack apps, low-code internal tools) to drive adoption and make automations accessible to non-technical users.
• Collaborate with the Sales, Partnerships, Product, Engineering, and Data Science teams. Select priority projects, create prototypes quickly, and ensure the solutions we create are put into use.
• Apply best practices in DevOps and monitoring, including CI/CD, automated testing, observability, and incident response guides.
• Enforce security and compliance best practices across all automations and data workflows.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 2-4 years experience in AI, automation, data engineering, or analytics engineering.
• Proficiency in SQL and Python; experience building and operating ETL/ELT pipelines.
• Experience designing and consuming APIs/webhooks and building services (FastAPI, Flask, or Node.js).
• Exposure to dbt and modern cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery).
• Experience incorporating AI/LLMs into workflows, including prompt design, data retrieval, evaluation, and human oversight.
• Familiarity with Git, CI/CD, automated testing, and event-driven systems (queues, pub/sub, webhooks).
• Strong communication skills: able to turn complex business processes into scalable automations and explain technical concepts clearly.
• Experience with at least one data visualization tool (Tableau, Mode, Power BI, Looker, or similar)
• Hands-on experience with workflow automation and low-code development platforms (Zapier, n8n, Gumloop, Superblocks)

Preferred Qualifications

• Built AI tools or automations adopted by non-technical users in business environments.
• Experience with frameworks like LangChain, LangGraph, or MCP for AI agent orchestration.
• Exposure to vector search/RAG and evaluation frameworks (e.g., Ragas, DeepEval).
• Experience creating Slack apps or other lightweight internal tools to support adoption.
• Familiarity with API tooling (OpenAPI/Swagger, Postman), contract testing, and monitoring.
• Experience in using cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure. Knowledge of containers like Docker. Skill in managing infrastructure with code.
• Integration experience with business tools (Salesforce, Slack, Google Workspace, Jira/Linear).
• Experience building automations in business intelligence tools (Jupyter, Grafana, Google Analytics)
• Prior exposure to e-commerce, retail analytics, or ad tech is a plus.

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