New Instacart VP to lead retail engineering practice from Toronto

Fast-growing grocery delivery service Instacart has hired a new vice-president of engineering and is moving into new office space in Toronto.

Karney Li was most recently chief technology officer at the online wealth management firm Wealthsimple and before that spent 10 years at Amazon.

Li takes on an important role at Instacart, overseeing the company’s North American retail engineering practice, building products and APIs (application program interfaces) for retail partners to launch and maintain their Instacart storefronts. Li will report to CTO Mark Schaaf at Instacart head office in San Francisco.

Through its partnerships with the likes of Loblaw and Walmart Canada, Instacart now reaches 60% of all Canadian households. On top of that, Instacart has added Pusateri’s to its list of client partners.

Read: Instacart's CEO on the importance of brick-and-mortar retail

Instacart will also move into a new 32,000-sq.-ft. office in Toronto’s popular Liberty Village later this year. The office will be home to more than 100 current employees with plans to grow to 300. In September, Instacart unveiled what it called “Instacart North” pledging to hire 200 new employees The move to Liberty Village comes after Instacart unveiled “Instacart North” in September pledging to hire 200 new employees in engineering, product, design and R&D roles.

Read: Instacart to turn Toronto office into tech hub

At Amazon Li worked at the e-commerce giant’s Seattle and Toronto offices, working on Kindle, Prime, supply chain, and fulfillment technologies.