Forward Deployed Engineer

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 customers during implementation engagements.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.