How It's Made
How It's Made
Monte Carlo, Puppetry and Laughter: The Unexpected Joys of Prompt Engineering
Author: Ben Bader The universe of the current Large Language Models (LLMs) engineering is electrifying, to say the least. The industry has been on fire with change since the launch of ChatGPT in November of Last year. We’re all seeing the rise of AI tooling across the entire industry, and it’s opening up product and development possibilities at an astounding rate. Instacart has been adopting…
Dec 19, 2023
How It's Made
Adopting PgCat: A Nextgen Postgres Proxy
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, and…
Mar 13, 2023
How It's Made
Getting to Know the Data Scientists at Instacart
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
How It's Made
The Instacart Bug Bounty Program – How We Work with White Hat Hackers to Secure Instacart
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
How It's Made
Personalizing Recommendations for a Learning User
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
How It's Made
From Postgres to Amazon DynamoDB 
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
How It's Made
Instacart’s Trust Program: How We Build Trust with Our Retailer Partners
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
How It's Made
How Instacart Uses Embeddings to Improve Search Relevance
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+ retailers, spanning a…
Sep 15, 2022
How It's Made
Lessons Learned: The Journey to Real-Time Machine Learning at Instacart
Authors: Guanghua Shu and Sahil Khanna Figure 1: How ML models support shopping journey at Instacart Instacart incorporates machine learning extensively to improve the quality of experience for all actors in our “four-sided marketplace” — customers who place orders on…
Sep 7, 2022
How It's Made
How Instacart Uses Machine Learning-Driven Autocomplete to Help People Fill Their Carts
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 what they’re…
Aug 30, 2022