• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 29, 2020

Instacart on Tuesday announced the appointment of its first vice president of engineering, advertising. Vik Gupta joins the company from Google, where he also served as vice president of engineering.

Gupta worked as one of Google’s earliest engineers on the G Suite product line, which includes Gmail, Calendar, and Docs. He also worked in local search and on the Assistant. Later he led the development of Google’s agency-focused advertising product, Search Ads 360, and oversaw the company’s ad-traffic quality engineering effort, where he led the team through a pivot to large-scale machine learning.

“We had a big ambition to revolutionize how productivity applications worked for business and education users,” he told Instacart in a post. “Even as a new member of the team, I was working on systems that were expected to scale to millions of users. That expectation of scale completely changed how I approached building systems.”

Google isn’t the only high-profile tech company where Gupta worked. He broke up a tenure of more than 14 years to spend eight months at Facebook as engineering director before Google no doubt recruited him back with a major promotion.

During his early years he spent time at IBM, Oracle, NCR, and Intuit, as well as trying his “hand at a couple of startups.” At Intuit, he worked on a team that built a web-based personal finance product, and worked with usability studies that brought in real-world users to gain in-depth insight into how people used the company’s products.

In his role at Instacart, Gupta will lead the company’s Advertising Engineering organization, overseeing the growing self-service advertising platform and managed ad products. He will work closely with Instacart CRO Seth Dallaire, who runs the advertising business.