Overview

Every year, people across the world spend nearly one trillion dollars on groceries. It’s an industry that’s been around for centuries. Food itself, however, has been a constant in people’s lives since the beginning of time. Yes, sustenance is essential, but it’s also much more than that. Food can be a part of a daily ritual or a special moment that resonates with people on a meaningful and emotional level. It can be a much-needed break in a long day, a taste that brings back memories, a creative experiment, a shared meal with loved ones, or even comfort during a hard time. Whether it’s a special occasion or an everyday occurrence, it should always be easy for people to get the ingredients they need.

The Instacart Design Team is dedicated to making grocery shopping effortless for everyone and finding solutions to large-scale opportunities that will forever change the way people feed themselves and their loved ones. We’re a four sided marketplace and design for the needs of Consumer, Shoppers, Retailers, and Advertisers.

The Instacart Design team focuses on designing, building & landing multi-platform product experiences that make grocery shopping effortless and create economic opportunity for our shoppers. The team crafts solutions for large-scale challenges that will change the way people feed themselves and their loved ones.

About the Role

The Staff Content Designer, Model Design for CoreX is one of our highest-impact roles where you'll shape how AI models interact with users across Instacart's core consumer experiences. You will view the model as the product itself, striking a delicate balance between maximizing the model's capabilities, reading between the lines in user queries to understand how best to help, and upholding user trust.

You'll embed with our Agentic design team and be part of the team reimagining the online grocery experience. You will collaborate closely with researchers to understand, predict, and design model behavior, while partnering with product managers, engineers, and designers across the company to ensure we're creating agentic experiences that solve and anticipate our customers' needs. This role requires exceptional taste, creativity, and writing skills combined with deep technical intuition to craft AI interactions that delight users and feel truly helpful.

As a general standard for all our designers and leaders, we are looking for people who thrive on building a strong design culture, lead with empathy and collaboration, and are committed to pushing the boundaries of quality and innovation in everything we ship. You'll be joining us in defining and evolving the newly established model design function at Instacart.

About the Job

• Work hand-in-hand with research teams to anticipate user needs and design AI behaviors that feel natural, helpful, and delightful across Instacart's grocery shopping experiences.
• Build alignment with cross-functional partners—including product, engineering, and design teams—to establish a unified conversational voice that resonates with customers throughout their journey.
• Drive continuous improvement of our AI systems by synthesizing insights from user testing and designing rigorous and useful evals to identify high-impact opportunities.
• Design and refine system prompts that enable personalized, scalable interactions, directly shaping how our AI assistants understand context, respond to needs, and create seamless shopping experiences.
• Develop innovative approaches to gathering training data that elevates model quality and ensures our AI truly understands the nuances of grocery shopping.
• Own the full lifecycle of content initiatives—from initial design through launch, measurement, and optimization—ensuring every iteration drives meaningful product outcomes.
• Establish and uphold Instacart's distinctive voice across all AI interactions, ensuring consistency with our content standards while making every word count.
• Balance multiple workstreams simultaneously, maintaining momentum and quality while navigating competing priorities and deadlines with independence and sound judgment.
• Set the standard for design excellence, actively mentoring team members and elevating craft across the organization through your work and leadership.

About You

Minimum Qualifications

• 12+ years creating content for consumer digital products, with a portfolio that demonstrates mastery in content design, narrative development, and establishing design standards. Must include at least 2 years of direct experience designing AI model interactions.
• Natural storyteller with refined taste and strong writing instincts who creates user experiences that surprise and delight. Your expertise spans language, design methodology, and content systems, enabling you to distill complexity into clarity.
• Deep knowledge of how information architecture and visual-verbal design work together to create coherent product experiences.
• Proven expertise in prompt engineering that drives personalization at scale. You go beyond surface-level conversational polish—you architect the underlying instructions that determine how AI systems think, respond, and adapt to individual user contexts.
• Technical fluency to understand how data composition, training approaches, and prompt modifications influence AI behavior and output quality.
• Strategic thinker who bridges user research, product goals, and business objectives to create language frameworks and UX copy that solve real problems.
• Self-directed operator who thrives in ambiguous, fast-moving environments, making smart tradeoffs and maintaining high standards without close supervision.
• Compelling communicator who builds buy-in for your vision through well-crafted presentations, interactive prototypes, and clear connections to company strategy.
• Passionate about developing others, consistently modeling excellence and providing guidance that helps teammates grow their craft.
• Energized by open-ended challenges that require you to establish structure, rally stakeholders, and chart a clear path forward where none existed before.
• Deeply empathetic and self-aware, with genuine commitment to creating experiences that work for diverse global audiences.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Find energy at the intersection of language, technology, and human behavior—particularly in pioneering how people and AI collaborate in everyday contexts.
• Embrace a test-and-learn mindset, readily exploring new directions while having the discipline to abandon approaches that don't deliver results.
• Engage thoughtfully with complex, sometimes abstract questions about user intent and AI behavior, while keeping the team focused on practical outcomes.