A Q&A with Mark Schaaf, Instacart’s first CTO
Big news — we’re excited to welcome Mark Schaaf to the Instacart family as our first-ever CTO. Mark comes to us from Thumbtack, where he was also CTO; and Google before that, where he led a team of engineers within Google’s mobile display advertising division. He’s got a passion for building out powerhouse engineering teams…and that’s exactly what he’s going to do here at Instacart. We’re aiming to double the size of our Hacker Org by the end of 2019.
At the end of Mark’s first week, he sat down with Apoorva (our CEO) and the whole team for a lunchtime fireside chat. We talked about a little bit of everything — bagging groceries, WAP phones, and (of course) committing code. Read the full Q&A:
Give us a bit of personal history. Where have you been and how did you get here?
It all started at my first job working at a grocery store. I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee and started at a regional grocery store — checking, bagging, stocking. So that’s where I started…CTO was definitely my next play.
In all seriousness, I came to California, and after working at a few tech companies, I was hired as the second engineer at AdMob. When we got started in mobile ads, the industry revolved around WAP phones in Europe. We had ad liquidity in the marketplace, and once the iPhone came out, we started making ads for smartphones. In 2008 when the app store launched, we were the first SDK in the app store. Three and a half years later, AdMob was acquired by Google. I ran mobile ads at Google, grew the team to a pretty significant size across four sites, and learned a lot about engineering at scale. It was a great 5 years.
Startups are my passion, though, and I wanted to go back to scaling up a team, so then I jumped over to Thumbtack. I got in pretty early and saw the team through a rapid growth period…and now I’m here at Instacart, another marketplace startup. I can’t wait to grow this team.
So why Instacart?
First of all, it’s a product that I use — I’ve been using Instacart since 2014. And when you look under the hood, Instacart’s engineering challenges are really complex. We’ve got a massive, four-sided marketplace; and then we have to run a logistics operation on top of that…that’s a lot of engineering.
You’re new — finishing up week one. How do you like to onboard new engineers?
So we need to double the size of our engineering team by the end of 2019. When you scale up teams, you need to streamline your onboarding as much as possible. I’m a fan of mentorship programs for new employees—programs wherein they can meet veteran team members and learn from them quickly. I’m also big on lunch-and-learns and forums—they’re a great way for new employees to learn why historical engineering decisions were made.
Most importantly, people need to check in code right away on day one. You learn so much about an engineering org when you start coding right away. I can’t emphasize this enough.
Describe your ideal software engineer.
A lot of great software engineering boils down to a few characteristics: being humble and thoughtful; being a good listener; being a good partner; and importantly, being a good citizen. I value folks who step up to do the things not everyone wants to do. I think we should celebrate refactoring as much as a product or feature launch. It’s important to celebrate the small wins alongside the big ones.
Now that week one is over, what’s your top priority moving forward?
Well, I’ve already checked in code — so that’s a start. I’m here because of the people, so moving forward, I’m trying to meet everybody over the next month or so. And after that—scaling up the Hacker Org!
Want to meet Mark? Instacart is hiring! Check out our current openings.
