Data Science Challenges at Instacart

Behind the scenes, Instacart is a revolutionary new e-commerce marketplace, an incredibly sophisticated last-mile logistics engine, and a dynamic source of work for thousands of personal shoppers. Each of these aspects of Instacart could be a whole company elsewhere, and data science plays a key role in our success in each endeavor.

In this article, I (our VP Data Science) highlight some challenges the data science team is tackling at Instacart ranging from logistics to personalization. I also go into detail on how we have organized data science to have maximal impact and what we look for when recruiting data scientists.

My friend works at Instacart, she says it totally sucks. Mainly because there's no guaranteed hourly pay and what she gets paid depends entirely on what the customers decide to give out as a tip. So for example sometimes she spends an hour grocery shopping for someone, then 30 minutes to drive to their house, and then the person can just arbitrarily decide to tip her $10. So she makes $10 for 90 minutes of work? That's below minimum wage. She says MOST people will tip $20 or $25 however not all. So all it takes is one cheapskate to not understand how long it takes for you to go and pick out and deliver all their groceries and you get totally screwed.

Apparently when she works in SF proper is the only place with a guaranteed wage, all surrounding areas you are at the mercy of what people decide to tip. Sounds outrageous, all it takes is one cheap idiot to completely ruin your shift and make it not worth it to work there.

fyi I interviewed for this team and 2 notes:

1 - I've been doing ad optimization / user classification / propensity scoring / product recommendations, warned them that I took a couple stochastic processes classes but haven't used them for a decade, and that I was entirely unsuited for OR type problems. They said that was ok and they where hiring for things I was suited for. Great. My in-person interview was primarily an OR problem best solved with stochastic processes.

2 - they were very responsive at first but after the interview, went radio silent for a week. After promising a response in a day. This was particularly annoying since I told them I had a written offer that I was pushing off for them. My guess is they were waiting to see if another candidate would accept. Which is fine, but the recruiter should have been honest with me. They ignored me for 5 business days after the interview -- 4 after their promised response -- before finally telling me no thanks. I'm not grumpy about being told no -- that's definitely happened before -- but their crappy behavior. Fortunately I'd already accepted the other offer after reading between the lines, but still, the experience left me grumpy.

I debated posting this for a while, but bluntly, I kind of felt like they wasted my time and was really not happy their internal recruiter blew me off after repeated promises otherwise. I'm sure they'll be along to say your experience will be different (and it may well be!) but here's a data point for your consideration. I'm just sharing my experience.

> they were very responsive at first but after the interview, went radio silent for a week. After promising a response in a day. This was particularly annoying since I told them I had a written offer that I was pushing off for them.

ugh, I hate that. I was jerked around by an a-list firm like that this fall and it was totally frustrating, especially because I turned down another offer while I was waiting to hear back. Really screwed me over and left me very bitter/annoyed. There's no respect and everyone's looking out for #1.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure she is going to, I know she and the other people that do it hate it. Shouldn't they be guaranteed minimum wage? I mean, if they don't make minimum wage they can sue, or report them to the Department of Labor, right?