Most of my work at Instacart was in service of making the company profitable and capturing as much demand as possible through logistics and supply efficiencies. Some of my interesting projects are:
Fast Delivery
Helped bring faster deliveries to Instacart Marketplace, which has historically optimized for 2-hr deliveries and made it possible to deliver as fast as 30 minutes for certain types of orders.
Press Release
COVID-19
Led several initiatives to scale the business during the peak of COVID-19 demand surge. One such feature is Fast & Flexible.
Press Release
Prop-22
Prepared the company for Prop 22 related compliance and helped adjust our algorithms to optimize for the new structure.
Instacart News
Walmart on Instacart
Helped launch Walmart on the Instacart Marketplace which comes with unique challenges due to the scale and size of Walmart stores. As part of this launch, we also brought super long distance deliveries to Instacart. (someone in San Francisco can get Walmart delivery from San Jose!)
Press Release
On-Demand Access To Work
Transitioned Instacart’s fulfillment from a pre-scheduled shifts based model to a fully on-demand realtime model. I led mobile, backend and ML development for this project end to end and scaled it from 0 to 1 to N. This change helped reduce lead time to work with Instacart from days to seconds. It also improved supply costs, labor costs and created a better experience for our shoppers.
Press Release
Optimization Algorithms for Last Mile Logistics
Built approximate algorithms for NP-hard problems like the vehicle routing problem and the assignment problem applied in the context of on-demand grocery delivery. My contributions here played a big role in lowering fulfillment costs and helped with profitability.
Simulations based Optimizations
Developed a simulation engine at Instacart that helped us with several use cases – from shopper staffing to testing new fulfillment models and running sensitivity analyses. This also allowed us to develop a healthy roadmap of projects that helped lower labor costs and improve on-time deliveries.
Jagannath Putrevu 