Instacart Ads Automated Bidding
Budget-based marketplace ads bidding, return estimation, pacing, simulation, and production rollout.
PhD Economics, UCLA ยท Senior machine learning engineer
Jonathan Gu
Economics, machine learning, and marketplace systems.
Production ML for ads bidding, growth targeting, inventory intelligence, and independent products.
Work
Selected work.
Five projects worth clicking.
Instacart Growth Machine Learning System
Causal targeting from experiment outcomes: expected incremental effect, budget allocation, and policy evaluation.
Instacart Inventory Intelligence
Item-store availability and fulfillment ML with noisy catalog, store, shopper, and operational signals.
ocbrain
Lightweight shared memory for Codex, Claude, and OpenClaw: source-backed history, MCP retrieval, feedback logging, and proposal-first learning.
Bountiful Garden
Neighborhood produce-sharing marketplace: product, trust, local coordination, and full-stack execution.
Links
Writing, papers, and proof.
Straight to the useful stuff.