Tech & Innovation
Authors: Yuanzheng Zhu, Guanghua Shu, Raochuan Fan, Vinesh Gudla, Tejaswi Tenneti Introduction When people search for items on Instacart, they don’t always type perfectly worded phrases. They might write “bread no gluten” or “x large zip lock” — and that’s okay. Our job is to understand what they mean, not just what they type. This process, called Query Understanding (QU), is the intent engine that...
Nov 21, 2025
Read time: 14 min
Tech & Innovation
Authors: Cheng Jia , Peng Qi , Joseph Haraldson , Adway Dhillon , Qiao Jiang , Sharath Rao Introduction Instacart Ads and Ranking Models At Instacart Ads, our focus lies in delivering the utmost relevance...
Dec 19, 2023
Read time: 13 min
Tech & Innovation
Authors: Rajpal Paryani , Han Li , Sahil Khanna , Walter Tuholski Background Griffin is Instacart’s Machine Learning (ML) platform, designed to enhance and standardize the process of developing and deploying ML applications. It significantly...
Nov 22, 2023
Read time: 10 min
Tech & Innovation
Authors: Han Li , Sahil Khanna , Jocelyn De La Rosa , Moping Dou , Sharad Gupta , Chenyang Yu and Rajpal Paryani Background About a year ago, we introduced the first version of Griffin,...
Nov 22, 2023
Read time: 9 min
Tech & Innovation
Tilman Drerup , Levi Boxell, and Robert Fletcher Tech firms are increasingly choosing to hire graduates from PhD programs in economics [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. In this blog post, we present the...
Nov 22, 2023
Read time: 8 min
Tech & Innovation
By Zain Adil, Kevin Lei and Ada Cohen Over the past few months, we’ve been building an internal AI assistant powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 models called Ava. Ava has seen accelerated adoption at...
Sep 7, 2023
Read time: 7 min
Tech & Innovation
By Michael Prescott This blog post is the last segment in a three-part series that outlines our innovative approach to overcoming inventory challenges, delving into the application of product design, machine learning, and engineering technology....
Sep 6, 2023
Read time: 10 min
Tech & Innovation
By James Zheng At Instacart, datasets are transformed for use in analytics, experimentation, machine learning, and retailer reporting. We use these datasets to make key business decisions that provide better experiences for our customers and...
Aug 17, 2023
Read time: 14 min
Tech & Innovation
By Nate Kupp Data is an integral part of how we do business at Instacart: for informing decisions, providing insights into how our users interact with the product, supporting ML/AI use, and much more. Over...
Aug 16, 2023
Read time: 10 min
Tech & Innovation
By Haixun Wang and Jagannath Putrevu Machine Learning (ML) is one of the most impactful technology levers we have at Instacart to make our services better and help our customers, shoppers, retailers, and brand partners....
Aug 15, 2023
Read time: 11 min