Wayfair Names Ashwin Rao & Niraj Nagrani to Technology Leadership Team

Wayfair Inc. (NYSE:W), one of the world’s largest destinations for the home, today announced Ashwin Rao joined the company as chief science officer, and Niraj Nagrani as vice president of global supplier marketplace, pricing, catalog and merchandising technologies. Both leaders report to Wayfair’s incoming chief technology officer, Fiona Tan, and join Wayfair’s strong bench of technologists driving the future of shopping across all categories of home.

“Technology underpins everything we do at Wayfair,” said Tan, incoming CTO, Wayfair. “As an e-commerce and supply chain leader with suppliers and operations around the world, Wayfair is at the forefront of solving some of the most sophisticated and complex technological challenges facing retail. Ashwin and Niraj bring valuable expertise to the leadership team as we work together to drive the future evolution of our customer experience across online and physical retail.”

In his role, Rao will help accelerate the company’s continued growth through technological innovation fueled by machine learning, mathematical modeling and algorithms that further strengthen the shopping experience. Before joining Wayfair, Rao served as vice president of artificial intelligence at Target Corporation where he led Target’s global AI and data science teams in developing products and solutions for supply chain, merchandising, search, recommendations and marketing. Rao will continue as adjunct professor at Stanford University, bringing the latest academic insights to Wayfair’s technology.

“The breadth and depth of Wayfair’s technological operations and expertise rival that of any technologically-advanced organization,” noted Rao. “I look forward to leading innovation that creates operational efficiencies, enables consumers to easily find the right product, and helps Wayfair achieve its growth objectives.”

Overseeing Wayfair’s merchandising and supplier experiences, Nagrani will drive innovation to enhance Wayfair’s global supplier catalog, merchandising, and pricing systems while also creating the best-in-class web/mobile experiences and data insights for suppliers. To this role, Nagrani brings more than two decades of tech leadership, most recently at Google as vice president of engineering, where he drove initiatives to deliver machine learning, artificial intelligence, mobile, web, and cloud tech solutions across Google consumer and developer products.

“Wayfair’s deep relationships across a world-class supplier ecosystem are critical to the success of our business,” said Nagrani. “We are committed to continually evolving our technology platform to make it as easy and efficient as possible for our suppliers to deliver their products to our customers. Both our supplier network and our customer base continue to grow, making this an exciting time to join Wayfair.”