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: Brad Nicholson, Andrew Tanner, Marco Montagna Instacart runs one of the largest PostgreSQL fleets on top of AWS RDS, and part of managing a fleet like this is to keep it up to date....
Jul 17, 2023
Read time: 10 min
Tech & Innovation
This is Part 2 of a three-part blog post series in which we outline how we addressed inventory challenges through product, machine learning, and engineering innovations. See Part 1 here . Introduction At Instacart, we...
Jul 17, 2023
Read time: 12 min
Tech & Innovation
This is the part-1 of a three-part blog post series in which we outline how we addressed inventory challenges through product, machine learning, and engineering innovations. A few years ago, we introduced the problem of...
Jul 10, 2023
Read time: 9 min
Tech & Innovation
Author: Jason Kim In today’s highly competitive digital marketplace, understanding the true value of the advertising effort is no longer a luxury but a necessity. While there are many methodologies used to evaluate the effectiveness...
Jun 30, 2023
Read time: 8 min
Tech & Innovation
Authors: David Vengerov , Vinesh Gudla , Tejaswi Tenneti , Haixun Wang , Kourosh Hakhamaneshi At Instacart, we strive to provide our customers with the most personalized experience possible by combining multiple considerations they may...
Jun 15, 2023
Read time: 16 min
Tech & Innovation
Author: Sylvia Lin At Instacart, we have a number of data pipelines with low-latency needs that handle over two trillion events a year. Those events help our engineering and product teams to make better decisions...
Apr 28, 2023
Read time: 9 min
Tech & Innovation
How Instacart uses distributed Machine Learning to efficiently train thousands of models in production Author: Han Li At Instacart, we take pride in offering a diverse range of machine learning (ML) products that empower every...
Mar 24, 2023
Read time: 10 min
Tech & Innovation
Authors: Mostafa Abdelraouf, Zain Kabani, Andrew Tanner In this post, we’ll be talking about PgCat , an open-source Postgresql Proxy that we have been using in production and contributing to. It provides connection pooling, load-balancing,...
Mar 13, 2023
Read time: 10 min
Tech & Innovation
Our Data Science team at Instacart is responsible for all data analytics, insights and experimentation at the company. The team partners with our Product and Engineering teams on all stages of the product life cycle,...
Dec 21, 2022
Read time: 16 min