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Lu Qi (simplified Chinese: 陆奇; traditional Chinese: 陸奇; pinyin: Lù Qí; born September 3, 1961) is more commonly known as Qi Lu in English (pronounced "chee loo"), is a Chinese software executive and engineer. He is currently the chief operating officer of Baidu. Qi previously was the Executive Vice President at Microsoft, leading the company's work on the Bing search engine, Skype, and Microsoft Office, and before that was a technology developer and manager for Yahoo!'s search technology division.
Qi was born in Shanghai, he was sent to live with his grandparents in a remote village in Jiangsu Province by his parents during the Cultural Revolution. Qi studied at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. After attending a talk by Carnegie Mellon University professor Edmund M. Clarke, Qi was invited to apply for a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University. Clarke even offered to waive the $45 application fee that Qi says he could never have come up with. In 1996, Qi graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Qi worked in one of IBM's research labs from 1996–98, then joined Yahoo! and eventually rose to manage 3,000 engineers and the development of search and search advertising technologies for the company. Qi's departure from Yahoo! in mid-2008 was long-planned, and he was contemplating opportunities in venture capital and even thinking of returning to China. However, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer personally recruited him to join the software giant. After joining Microsoft, Qi was instrumental in driving the partnership with Yahoo! in search and the launch of Bing.
Qi was involved in a bicycle accident in 2016 and took a leave from Microsoft in September 2016.
In January 2017, Qi joined Baidu as Group President and Chief Operating Officer, in charge of products, technology, sales, marketing and operations.