How to Build a Recommendation System at Scale: Insights from Instacart

A Senior ML Engineer's perspective on production constraints, rules vs ML and the workflow behind large-scale recommender systems

Fellow Data Tinkerers,

Following on from previous posts talking to people in the field, today I will be talking with Ahsaas Bajaj who is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Instacart. He works on large-scale recommendation systems that serves millions of customers.

We talked about his rise from software engineering to machine learning at Instacart, how does he decide between rules based vs ML approaches and how he approaches the work now as a more senior stakeholder.

So without further ado, let’s get into it!