About this role
We're 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 we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.
Instacart is a Flex First team
There’s 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 it’s 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.
Overview
Instacart's Enterprise Solutions team is building a first-of-its-kind business: embedding directly with enterprise retail and CPG partners to design, sell, and deliver AI-powered solutions at scale. We are a small, senior, field-first pod — part startup, part consultancy — defining the playbook as we go.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you are Instacart's hands-on technical presence inside enterprise customer environments. You will sit inside retailers' and partners' ecosystems, understand their infrastructure, and build agentic AI solutions on top of it. As part of your mission, you will brainstorm with partner technical leaders and collaborate on solution designs that deliver value while remaining compatible with existing environments and infrastructure. You will also collaborate closely with Instacart R&D's team, informing platform evolution and serving as the bridge between what gets built internally and what actually works in the real world.
About the Job
• 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 custome