Wayfair has appointed Ashwin Rao chief science officer and Niraj Nagrani as vp of global supplier marketplace, pricing, catalog and merchandising technologies.
Both will report to Wayfair’s incoming chief technology officer, Fiona Tan.
Wayfair has charged Rao with helping to accelerate the company’s continued growth through technological innovation fueled by machine learning, mathematical modeling and algorithms that further strengthen the shopping experience, the company stated. Prior to joining Wayfair, Rao served as vp of artificial intelligence at Target Corp., where he led the company’s global AI and data science teams in developing products and solutions for supply chain, merchandising, search, recommendations and marketing, Wayfair maintained.
In his new role 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, the company noted. Nagrani has more than two decades of tech leadership, most recently at Google as vp of engineering, where he drove initiatives to deliver machine learning, artificial intelligence, mobile, web and cloud tech solutions across the company’s consumer and developer products, Wayfair indicated.
“Technology underpins everything we do at Wayfair,” said Tan in announcing the appointments. “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.”
