Forward Deployed Engineer

- Embed with enterprise retail customers and partners to understand their technical environments, data systems, and business workflows.

- Design, build, and deploy AI and agentic solutions tailored to each customer's specific infrastructure and needs, across Instacart's full platform suite.

- Extend, adapt, and integrate Instacart's core AI capabilities to fit customer ecosystems, even when those systems are undocumented or non-standard.

- Maintain a close working relationship with R&D: participate in product reviews, flag platform gaps encountered in the field, and propose concrete changes that would make the platform work better for enterprise customers.

- Collaborate closely with the AI Solutions Architect to translate domain requirements and architecture into working software.

- Serve as the primary technical point of contact for customers during implementation engagements.

We are looking for builders who thrive in the room with customers, treat ambiguity as a puzzle, and can switch between writing code and facilitating a stakeholder conversation in the same afternoon.

- 5+ years of software engineering experience with a demonstrated ability to write and ship production-quality code.

- Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs, function calling, tool use, agent frameworks, or RAG pipelines-you have shipped something agentic that real users depended on.

- Proficiency in Python or another scripting/backend language commonly used in data-intensive environments.

- Proven ability to integrate with messy, heterogeneous enterprise data environments - undocumented APIs, schema mismatches, auth complexity, and legacy systems that do not behave the way the docs claim.

- Direct experience with external enterprise customers or technical stakeholders in a consulting or customer-facing capacity - earning trust in the room matters as much as writing code.

- Strong working knowledge of retail and e-commerce system fundamentals.

- Strong communication skills - able to translate field learnings and technical findings into actionable input for R&D and product teams.

- Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where the process is not fully defined.

- Prior work in a forward deployed, embedded engineering, or professional services capacity.

- Background at a startup or early-stage company where you wore multiple hats.

- Experience in enterprise software implementation, systems integration, or solutions engineering.

- Exposure to retail tech, e-commerce, or supply chain systems.