About

Ji Chen is a highly experienced and results-driven Senior Engineering Manager at Instacart, with a proven track record of leading cross-functional teams and driving hyper-growth. With over 20 years of relevant experience, he has built and shipped super impactful solutions to multi-sided marketplace optimization, on-demand logistics, and real-time systems. Prior to his journey at Instacart and Uber, Ji spent over 10 years researching and developing medical AI products using image processing and machine learning. Ji is known for being a hands-on and methodological leader who is passionate about coaching and growing technical leaders by taking risks on ambitious individuals. He is an empathetic leader who is capable of growing, assembling, and motivating large and diverse teams, reaching consensus, defining roadmaps, setting goals, implementing standards & processes, and delivering wins over wins. Currently, Ji is the Senior Engineering Manager for Marketplace at Instacart, where he is leading a team of machine learning engineers, backend engineers, mobile engineers, and data scientists to make Instacart's three-sided marketplace more efficient, with better experience and higher quality. He is excited about the new Marketplace org of Instacart and is looking for talented individuals to join his team. Ji's past experience includes leading the Shopper Staffing and Shopper Earnings teams at Instacart, where he was responsible for forecasting demand and supply, targeting growth projection, setting shopper hiring targets, balancing supply and demand through flexible scheduling and real-time scaling, iterating on all scheduling UI to enhance shopper experience, estimating shopper capacity for a variety of fulfillment models, optimizing delivery windows to maximize demand conversion, and building product & engineering solutions to align Instacart pay principles and shopper compensation. Ji holds a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering Physics from Tsinghua University. He is skilled in Senior Software Engineering, ML, Mobile, Backend, AI, Image Processing, UI, Data Science, and Research Science. Ji is a husband, father of a 9th grader, mentor & learner, and loyal friend of many intellectual individuals.