Reading room.
Engineering blogs & AI research
A reading room from engineering teams and AI labs: titles, short feed excerpts, and links to the originals. For my own essays, explore the writing archive.
- 1359 articles tracked
- 37 sources
- Refresh scheduled daily
Sources
Agentic Machine Learning Modeling at Instacart
Tilman Drerup, Moe Moazzami, Shih-Ting Lin, Greg Reda (and many more) Introduction At Instacart, artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the way our machine learning engineers operate. In a prior blog post , we…
Blueberry: Force Multiplier For The On-Call Engineer
How we built a Slack-native on-call reasoning harness at Instacart that shortens time to first insight, speeds up theory testing, and turns tribal knowledge into reusable infrastructure. Key Contributors: Karthik Halukur…
Variance Reduction Below the Randomization Grain
Sergio Camelo, Caitlin Kearns, Matias Cersosimo, and Tilman Drerup As artificial intelligence increases the velocity of engineering and science teams, experimental throughput is set to become a bottleneck for many produc…
Leveraging PyFixest for High-Cardinality Marketplace Modeling at Instacart
Benjamin S. Knight Scaling Marketplace experiments requires specialized statistical techniques. We examine why standard ordinary least squares regression (OLS) becomes computationally intractable when controlling for hig…
From Scoring to Spelling: Rebuilding Ads Retrieval at Instacart
Key Contributors: Karuna Ahuja, Marko Avdalovic, Soroush Sobhkhiz, Shrikar Archak, Xiyu Wang, Ji Chao Zhang, Hao Yan Introduction Every time a user opens Instacart, they see product recommendations: on the retailer home…
Semantic IDs: Product Understanding at Scale
Key Contributors: Shrikar Archak, Karuna Ahuja, Soroush Sobhkhiz, Marko Avdalovic, Xiyu Wang, JiChao Zhang, Hao Yan, Chris Hartley Introduction Operating a grocery catalog at Instacart’s scale means managing millions of…
From Scoring to Spelling: Rebuilding Ads Retrieval at Instacart
Key Contributors: Karuna Ahuja, Marko Avdalovic, Soroush Sobhkhiz, Shrikar Archak, Xiyu Wang, Ji Chao Zhang, Hao Yan Introduction Every time a user opens Instacart, they see product recommendations: on the retailer home…
Semantic IDs: Product Understanding at Scale
Key Contributors: Shrikar Archak, Karuna Ahuja, Soroush Sobhkhiz, Marko Avdalovic, Xiyu Wang, JiChao Zhang, Hao Yan, Chris Hartley Introduction Operating a grocery catalog at Instacart’s scale means managing millions of…
How AI Changes the Role of Applied Scientists
Levi Boxell, Tilman Drerup, Alexandr Lenk The Economics Team at Instacart is an applied science team that operates at the intersection of machine learning engineering and economics. Similar to other applied science teams…
How AI Changes the Role of Applied Scientists
Levi Boxell, Tilman Drerup, Alexandr Lenk The Economics Team at Instacart is an applied science team that operates at the intersection of machine learning engineering and economics. Similar to other applied science teams…
Scaling Personalized Marketing for Multi-Tenant Commerce Platforms
TL;DR Background: Marketing Across Marketplace and Storefront Instacart operates across two distinct commerce experiences: Instacart Marketplace, our first-party consumer marketplace Storefront Pro, our white-label e-com…
Scaling Personalized Marketing for Multi-Tenant Commerce Platforms
TL;DR Background: Marketing Across Marketplace and Storefront Instacart operates across two distinct commerce experiences: Instacart Marketplace, our first-party consumer marketplace Storefront Pro, our white-label e-com…
Empowering Carrot Ads with Domain Adaptive Learning
Authors: Trey Zhong, Xiyu Wang Contributors: Joseph Haraldson, Sharad Gupta, Sarah Lamacchia Introduction Carrot Ads is Instacart’s omnichannel retail media solution that allows retailer partners to build and scale their…
Empowering Carrot Ads with Domain Adaptive Learning
Authors: Trey Zhong, Xiyu Wang Contributors: Joseph Haraldson, Sharad Gupta, Sarah Lamacchia Introduction Carrot Ads is Instacart’s omnichannel retail media solution that allows retailer partners to build and scale their…
Our Early Journey to Transform Instacart’s Discovery Recommendations with LLMs
Key Contributors: Moein Hasani, Hamidreza Shahidi, Trace Levinson, Guanghua Shu Introduction At Instacart, we are laser-focused on improving the user experience by making shopping feel easy, engaging, and personalized. O…
Our Early Journey to Transform Instacart’s Discovery Recommendations with LLMs
Key Contributors: Moein Hasani, Hamidreza Shahidi, Trace Levinson, Guanghua Shu Introduction At Instacart, we are laser-focused on improving the user experience by making shopping feel easy, engaging, and personalized. O…
Turning Data into Velocity: Caper’s Edge and Cloud Data Flywheel with Capsight
Key Contributors: Youming Luo, Andrew Tanner, Matas Sriubiskis, Sylvia Lin, Sikun Zhu, Lei Li, Xiao Zhou Introduction Caper is Instacart’s AI-powered smart cart that provides customers with a fast, seamless, and intuitiv…
Turning Data into Velocity: Caper’s Edge and Cloud Data Flywheel with Capsight
Key Contributors: Youming Luo, Andrew Tanner, Matas Sriubiskis, Sylvia Lin, Sikun Zhu, Lei Li, Xiao Zhou Introduction Caper is Instacart’s AI-powered smart cart that provides customers with a fast, seamless, and intuitiv…
From print to digital: Making weekly flyers shoppable at Instacart through computer vision and LLMs
From Print to Digital: Making Weekly Flyers Shoppable at Instacart Through Computer Vision and LLMs Key contributors: Prithvi Srinivasan, Shishir Kumar Prasad, Kristen Morgan, Bryan Pham, Rick Shukla, Preeti Chadha, Vipu…
From print to digital: Making weekly flyers shoppable at Instacart through computer vision and LLMs
From Print to Digital: Making Weekly Flyers Shoppable at Instacart Through Computer Vision and LLMs Key contributors: Prithvi Srinivasan, Shishir Kumar Prasad, Kristen Morgan, Bryan Pham, Rick Shukla, Preeti Chadha, Vipu…
Migrating to Jetpack Compose
Migrating to Jetpack Compose: How AI Accelerated Our Journey at Caper Introduction At Instacart, our Caper smart carts bring together AI, computer vision, and real-time data to power the future of in-store shopping. Cust…
Migrating to Jetpack Compose
Migrating to Jetpack Compose: How AI Accelerated Our Journey at Caper Introduction At Instacart, our Caper smart carts bring together AI, computer vision, and real-time data to power the future of in-store shopping. Cust…
Building The Intent Engine: How Instacart is Revamping Query Understanding with LLMs
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…
Building The Intent Engine: How Instacart is Revamping Query Understanding with LLMs
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…