Senior Marketing Decision Scientist II

About the role

This role owns the full measurement lifecycle for Instacart's marketing performance. You will define how we quantify channel impact, evaluate portfolio trade-offs, and test causal relationships in a fast-paced environment. Your work will directly shape multi-million-dollar investment decisions and balance analytical depth with speed. If you enjoy turning ambiguous, high-stakes questions into actionable strategies that support sustainable acquisition and retention growth, this is your role. You will translate complex analytical outputs into clear narratives that guide leadership choices and influence how marketing dollars are allocated on a quarterly basis.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Design intake frameworks that unify measurement approaches across channels, aligning marketing mix modeling, touch attribution, and incrementality testing for initiatives such as paid search, paid social, display, affiliates, CTV, and lifecycle/CRM programs.
• Build and maintain predictive models for customer lifetime value, churn probability, audience response propensities, and budget allocation scenarios, collaborating closely with data engineering to ensure pipeline reliability, data quality, and timely availability of analytical assets.
• Design, launch, and analyze controlled experiments including geo tests, PSA tests, and holdouts, quantifying treatment lift, assessing heterogeneity effects, and establishing decision rules under uncertainty to inform targeting strategies and budget adjustments.
• Synthesize analytical results into clear, executive-facing narratives and recommendations, ensuring that insights are actionable, appropriately caveated, and aligned with strategic priorities across marketing and finance functions.
• Create and curate executive-facing dashboards in tools such as Looker or Mode, tracking key performance indicators, explaining performance drivers, and enabling data-driven conversations with leadership through self-service access to reliable measurement artifacts.
• Partner with Strategic Finance and marketing leadership on forecasting, scenario planning, and quarterly planning processes, translating model outputs and experimental evidence into views on revenue, cost, and contribution outcomes.
• Set the analytical standard for the team through ruthless prioritization, peer reviews, and documentation, ensuring that methodologies are transparent, reproducible, and defensible across stakeholders.
• Mentor analysts and data scientists by providing hands-on guidance, elevating the quality of communication, and fostering a culture where measurement quality and curiosity are paramount.
• Champion measurement quality by defining data validation checks, documentation standards, and testing safeguards that reduce risk, increase trust, and support ongoing improvements to the measurement stack.
• Translate evolving business questions into analytical roadmaps, working cross-functionally to scope studies, clarify assumptions, and deliver insights that keep pace with a dynamic marketplace and shifting customer expectations.

Requirements

• Bring 6 or more years of experience in marketing analytics or data science within technology, e-commerce, or marketplace environments, with a track record of handling complex analytical problems and stakeholder communication.
• Demonstrate advanced proficiency in SQL and at least one of Python or R for modeling, experimentation analysis, and production-grade implementation, ensuring that analyses are efficient, scalable, and well-structured.
• Possess hands-on experience designing and analyzing marketing experiments such as A/B tests, geo tests, and holdouts, with a solid grasp of experimental design, causal inference, and how to translate results into decision-making frameworks that account for uncertainty.
• Show comfort working with large, multi-dimensional data sets and noisy digital marketing signals, applying statistical rigor to derive insights that meaningfully inform high-impact marketing decisions.
• Exhibit strong judgment in prioritizing analytical efforts under constraints, balancing depth of analysis with the need for timely decisions in a fast-moving e-commerce environment.
• Communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences, translating sophisticated analytical concepts into clear recommendations that can be understood and acted upon by leaders across the organization.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional partners, aligning on definitions, data standards, and expectations to ensure consistency and trust in the measurement approaches used across channels.
• Take ownership of analytical workflows, from data exploration through insight delivery, ensuring that methodologies are documented, assumptions are explicit, and results are reproducible over time.

Nice to have

• Experience with streaming data or real-time decisioning tools that support timely measurement is a plus.

Tools and skills

Core skills include SQL, Python, R, Looker, and Mode. You are comfortable working with data pipelines and analytical platforms to deliver reliable insights at scale. You understand how to leverage these tools to build robust analytical foundations, automate routine tasks, and support experimentation at the level of sophistication expected by senior leadership.

Practical notes

Please note that this role is based in the United States with remote work options, and Instacart operates as a Flex First team, allowing you to choose where you do your best work while staying connected through regular in-person events. The base salary range for this position is $129,840.00 to $193,260.00 annually, subject to location and other factors. Please About the company

Instacart is an American delivery company that operates a grocery delivery and pick-up service via an app and website. Founded in 2012, Instacart partners with over 1,400 retail banners across North America.