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: James Cha, Vickie Li, Shashank Mirji, and Frank Filho Let’s face it, there is no such thing as 100% bug-free code. And there is particularly no such thing as 100% security. That’s why a...
Dec 13, 2022
Read time: 7 min
Tech & Innovation
A talk by Prof. Hongning Wang as part of Instacart’s Distinguished Speaker Series Co-authored by Haixun Wang and Jagannath Putrevu Recommendation systems are at the heart of Instacart: we want to surface the most appropriate...
Dec 5, 2022
Read time: 5 min
Tech & Innovation
Authors: Andrew Tanner, Manas Paldhe, Stefan Wild, Tristan Fletcher Instacart is the leading online grocery company in North America. Users can shop from more than 75,000 stores with more than 500 million products on shelves....
Nov 21, 2022
Read time: 11 min
Tech & Innovation
Authors: Blake Hoge, Sr Governance, Risk, and Compliance Engineer, and James Cha, Sr Security Engineer Building trust with our retailer partners is one of Instacart’s highest priorities. Instacart CEO Fidji Simo sets the tone at...
Nov 16, 2022
Read time: 6 min
Tech & Innovation
Authors: Xiao Xiao , Taesik Na , Tejaswi Tenneti , Guanghua Shu As a fast-growing e-commerce platform and the leading grocery technology company, Instacart has an ever-expanding catalog of over 1 billion products from 900+...
Sep 15, 2022
Read time: 12 min
Tech & Innovation
Authors: Guanghua Shu and Sahil Khanna Instacart incorporates machine learning extensively to improve the quality of experience for all actors in our “four-sided marketplace” — customers who place orders on Instacart apps to get deliveries...
Sep 7, 2022
Read time: 12 min
Tech & Innovation
Authors: Esther Vasiete Tejaswi Tenneti For an eCommerce platform like Instacart, Search is an important tool for making shopping feel effortless by helping people find the products they want, even when they are not sure...
Aug 30, 2022
Read time: 12 min
Tech & Innovation
Authors: Benjamin S. Knight & Bryan Rusk One of our core missions at Instacart is to enable our retailer partners. When we succeed at deriving efficient delivery routes, accurately predicting the time it takes to...
Aug 17, 2022
Read time: 8 min
Tech & Innovation
Anahita Tafvizi joined Instacart in early 2021 and today, she leads the Data Science team which has more than doubled in size during her tenure. Our Data Science team is charged with identifying and informing...
Jul 26, 2022
Read time: 8 min