Varouj Chitilian joins Instacart as a VP of Engineering
Just this week, we welcomed Varouj Chitilian as our newest Vice President of Engineering. In his new role, Varouj will oversee the consumer and growth teams that build the products Instacart customers interact with every day.
Varouj joins us following lengthy tenures at Google and Oracle. He’s managed and scaled engineering teams that built both consumer and advertiser-facing products. He spent years working on AdWords Frontend and Search Ads Quality, before jumping into the digital payments space, where he managed teams behind Android Pay and Google Wallet.
We sat down with Varouj to chat frontend engineering, data wrangling, and building out a technical organization. Check out the interview:
So you started your career as a front-end engineer. What are some lessons you learned early on that you’ll never forget?
Frontend engineering is under appreciated. Both the time it takes to do a great job on UI, and the complexity of building great, performant, and consistent UI is constantly underestimated. On mobile platforms, this is exacerbated — does the animation work on different screen resolutions, different Android OS’, or on low-end devices? What happens when there’s a notch?
Making great UI is difficult, doing it at scale in a large application is even harder. When you mess up, the results are glaring. And when things look perfect, it’s taken for granted. At the end of the day, though, it was always gratifying to be able to point to a checkbox and tell your friend — I put that there!
Why the jump to Instacart?
Instacart has a large, loyal user base and hundreds of retail partners, but the company is at an early enough stage that an individual engineer can make his or her mark. That’s what really excited me about the company. At a larger company, best practices are written in stone, infrastructure has already been scaled, the machine learning infrastructure is in place, and the frameworks are widely used. Basically, all the fun stuff is already done and in the books. At Instacart, I’m excited to help shape these core pieces of process and technology. So far, the brisk pace of development and change has been exhilarating.
As an experienced engineer, you’ll get the unique opportunity to scale the company’s technical infrastructure, frameworks, and platforms to accommodate a large growth in customer traffic. You will decide what technologies the company uses and how the technologies are configured to find the optimal architecture for reliability and engineering productivity. You will be integral in designing and upholding processes that promote great coding practices, and ensure the service is running like a finely tuned Ferrari.
As a growing engineer, you get the chance to master software engineering. And you can make an impact on day one — no onerous development process and waiting for three weeks to push code to production. Everything you work on will be critical to the company. There are no projects that aren’t absolutely necessary for the growth of our consumer product. Every line of code you write will count!
What engineering challenges are unique to Instacart?
An Instacart order can be scheduled well in advance, or delivered in as little as an hour. To accomplish this it is optimal to have perfect information — to know with 100% accuracy what products are available to the store, what shoppers are available to deliver the orders, and what the user wants if items in their order are not available. The unique engineering challenge for Instacart is being able to fill these orders in near real-time with imperfect information. Tons of variables are at play in our technology chain — retail inventory, item pricing, shopper availability…even traffic conditions.
Getting this right takes a level of reliability in infrastructure, clarity of product, and sophistication of machine learning that is rare…even at the largest tech companies.
It is week one — you’re working your way through orientation — what’s the first project you’re going to work on once you’re settled?
To get to know the codebase, I’ll probably run some experiments to test some ideas I’ve thought of as an Instacart user!
In the long-term, I’m excited about not only building great products but also building out a strong engineering culture. As Instacart grows, one of my personal goals is to build out a world-class engineering team and make sure Instacart becomes a top-tier technical brand.
Want to work with Varouj? Instacart is hiring! Check out our current engineering openings.
