Greetings, Karney Li!

A Q&A with our newest VP of Engineering

Karney Li just joined Team Instacart to lead our Retail Engineering Team. From our Toronto engineering hub — Instacart North — Karney will build out the team that works on the APIs and products retail companies use to build and maintain their Instacart storefronts.

Li’s a fixture in the Toronto tech community. He comes to us from Wealthsimple, where he was CTO, and Amazon before that, where he was a was a Software Engineering Manager for Amazon Fulfillment Technologies. We sat down with him to talk about engineering philosophy, org building, and breakfast 🍳

What technical challenges do you most enjoy working on?

Every org encounters operational, latency, stability, magnitude, quality, data, and architectural challenges as they grow. Challenges like these are all, in a sense, surmountable with enough time. My goal is always to enable teams to meet these challenges faster. By increasing the rate that we can test hypotheses, we can shorten the feedback time. In turn, this improves our understanding, allowing us to iterate and arrive at a solution faster.

That’s one of the most challenging things about moving quickly with a maturing, widely-used product — engineers can’t just “move fast and break things.” It’s important to perform controlled experiments that mimic real conditions as closely as possible. It’s important to engineer safety nets so that regular experimentation can happen with controlled variables. Otherwise, people will become afraid of the consequences of failure. Failure is necessary for innovation…and being able to fail without fear is a great challenge.

What qualities do you look for when you’re hiring engineers into your org?

I think great engineers need to be naturally curious. Examining things closely is the first step in making them better.

Attention to detail is incredibly important, too. At Instacart, we’re working with large volumes of data at scale. If you don’t pay attention to the details, small problems can become large problems very quickly. Sometimes people can get overwhelmed by the size of problems — it’s all about the details and understanding their effects.

Every great engineer I’ve met has been a collaborative team player. It doesn’t matter how smart someone is—no one can do it all themselves. It’s critical that teammates work to build up those around them.

What’s the first project you’re going to work on once you’re settled?

Honestly, it’s hard to say, but I know I’ll be patient. I really want to get to know the people on the team, understand existing tools and software systems, and assess areas needed for growth. I think it’s important to respect and appreciate what’s come before and understand the business objectives before plotting an engineering vision. While there’s always low hanging fruit, I like being thoughtful and strategic and working on things that will deliver long-term value.

What item is always in your Instacart basket?

Tomatoes! I’m pretty easy, I like to scramble them with eggs 🍅

Want to work with Karney? Instacart is hiring! Check out our current openings in the Toronto Office.

Instacart

Author

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 80,000 stores across more than 14,000 cities in North America. To read more Instacart posts, you can browse the company blog or search by keyword using the search bar at the top of the page.