Instacart Expands Senior Leadership Team

Instacart made several top-level-executive changes this week to expand the company’s leadership team, the San Francisco-based online grocery pioneer said Tuesday.

The online grocery platform said in a blog post that it will now align Instacart’s commercial teams under Chris Rogers as chief business officer. Rogers will oversee all retail functions as well as the leadership of the brand partnerships team.

“Chris has driven tremendous value for Instacart as VP of retail for the past three years,” an Instacart statement said. “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.”

Rogers' leadership has helped Instacart to grow from 300 retail banners when Rogers joined to more than 800 today, the company said.

Instacart VP of Engineering Varouj Chitilian will be promoted to chief technology officer, as its current chief technology officer Mark Schaaf is “winding down his work with the company to take a break with family and pursue new opportunities.”

Varouj, who joined the company nearly four years ago, 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,” the statement said.

Instacart’s Head of Infrastructure JJ Zhuang is taking on the expanded role of chief architect. Zhuang will be responsible for driving technology and architecture decisions across all Instacart product pillars to further the company’s growth.

Looking to elevate its product and marketing leadership, Instacart’s head of product Daniel Danker has been promoted to chief product officer and head of marketing Laura Jones has been promoted to chief marketing officer. 

Instacart said Danker “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.”

In other news, Instacart last month rebranded its Instacart Express subscription service as Instacart , in which all members of a household will be able to share one Instacart account and place combined orders.