Expanding Instacart’s Senior Leadership Team

Today we’re excited to share that we’re elevating a number of our leaders and extending our senior leadership bench as we continue to pursue our vision as a grocery technology company. 

Aligning Instacart’s Commercial Teams under Chris Rogers as Chief Business Officer 

Chris Rogers will be taking on the expanded role of Chief Business Officer, continuing to oversee all Retail functions and taking on leadership of the Brand Partnerships team. Chris has driven tremendous value for Instacart as Vice President of Retail for the past three years. With more than a decade of experience at Apple prior to joining Instacart and several years working directly with our retail partners, Chris has honed deep expertise in strategic and commercial relationships. His leadership has allowed Instacart to build meaningful relationships with new partners and significantly expand our work with a number of the top grocers in North America — growing from 300 retail banners when Chris joined to more than 800 today.

We believe that more closely aligning our retail and brand partnerships organizations under Chris’ leadership will further align teams in support of our retail enablement vision and create more connective tissue as we continue to innovate for our hundreds of retail partners and thousands of brand partners. By combining these teams, we believe we can create solutions that drive more value for all of our partners.  

New Leadership for our Engineering Teams 

As we continue to build pioneering technologies for the grocery industry, our talented engineering teams are at the core of achieving our vision. 

After four impactful years with the company, Mark Schaaf is winding down his work with Instacart to take a break with family and pursue new opportunities. From serving as the company’s first Chief Technology Officer to helping us scale through COVID, Mark has done tremendous work here and we are incredibly grateful for his contributions.

As we look ahead, we’re excited to share that Instacart’s VP of Engineering, Varouj Chitilian, will be assuming the role of Chief Technology Officer. Since joining the company nearly four years ago, Varouj has led the engineering team through a number of Instacart’s most significant technical milestones, including scaling our app and site capabilities as online grocery adoption rapidly accelerated alongside the pandemic, and modernizing the Instacart App tech stack and architecture to maintain efficiency alongside significant team growth. His leadership has also been key to the continued growth and success of the Instacart App as we’ve evolved the app and introduced new features to enhance the customer experience. Finally, as a tenured senior leader on the team, Varouj has also played a significant role in hiring a number of our key senior engineers and leaders.

In addition to Varouj’s new role, JJ Zhuang will be taking on the newly-created role of Chief Architect. In this expanded role, JJ will drive technology and architecture decisions across all Instacart product pillars, and ensure engineering investment is best aligned with long term business strategy. JJ is a veteran engineering leader here at Instacart who has served in key leadership roles as VP of Fulfillment, and most recently, Head of Infrastructure. In his four years with the company, JJ led the early resilience work to support the stability and scale of Instacart product systems, recruited top technical and leadership talent, and took on many critical challenges of the time. As Chief Architect, JJ will work closely with Varouj and engineers across orgs to elevate engineering excellence and foster ownership that transcends team boundaries. We’re excited to have JJ in this important new role for the company. 

Elevating Our Product and Marketing Leadership 

We’re also pleased to share that Daniel Danker has been promoted to Chief Product Officer and Laura Jones has been promoted to Chief Marketing Officer. Both Daniel and Laura joined the company in 2021, and since then, have driven significant growth and strategic alignment for the company and evolved our role in the industry.

Daniel has elevated Instacart’s product offering across the board, delivering more engaging experiences for customers and shoppers, and ultimately delivering more value for our retail and brand partners. Daniel has driven dozens of meaningful new product launches in the last year, including the launch of Instacart+ and Instacart Platform, Priority Delivery, and new product offerings for Instacart shoppers like the shopper achievement Cart Star program. He’s also led the expansion of Instacart’s convenience offerings, the growth of new beyond grocery verticals, and the introduction of the new Instacart App Home screen. These product enhancements have driven increased customer savings, growth for Instacart+ and new verticals, and important progress as we focus on access and personalization.  

Laura has significantly enhanced and evolved our marketing efforts as a company. With Laura’s leadership, our marketing is now driving a more meaningful part of our growth, we’ve significantly boosted our spend efficiency, and we’ve made big strides in unaided brand awareness. Laura has also played an instrumental role in the evolution of the Instacart brand. She drove the launch of our new master brand, built an incredible in-house studio, expanded our capabilities from inbound demand to programmatic media, and refined our creative ethos for our customers. She also led the launch of our first-ever national brand campaign and has debuted significant campaigns for consumers, shoppers, retailers and brands. 

As we reimagine the role that Instacart has to play – as an enablement platform for our retail partners and pioneer for the industry – ensuring our teams are set up for success has never been more important to our future. 

The growth of our leadership team is a testament to our expanded vision as a retail enablement platform and grocery technology company, and we’re excited to see these leaders and our teams drive even more value for our partners, customers and shoppers as we look ahead.  

Instacart

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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.