Snapdeal to add 1,000 computer engineers to its ‘rockstar’ tech team by December

Online marketplace Snapdeal is on a mission to ramp up its 1,000-strong technology team with world class computer engineers from India and the Bay Area by the year end.

Having grown its tech team from 200 to 1,000 engineers in 12 months, Snapdeal will add 1,000 new engineers to its technology teams in Delhi and Bengaluru and end the year with a 2,000-strong technology powerhouse.

The ramp up is in alignment with co-founder and CEO Kunal Bahl’s vision of building India’s most impactful digital commerce platform and ecosystem to meet the aspirations of millions of consumers and small businesses in the country.

“We are scouting for world class talent in India and the Bay Area and will announce a host of mid to senior level tech hires in July. Of our 1,000 new hires, we have made campus offers to 400 engineers from IITs and NITs, who will be joining us in July.

“The rest will be lateral hires with 3-5 years of experience for mid-level positions and 5-8 years of experience for managerial positions,” Saurabh Nigam, Vice-President (HR), Snapdeal, toldBusinessLine.

Technology powerhouse

Over the last few months, Snapdeal has been hiring at a frantic pace to get its technology leadership in place, to contribute a strategic view of what needs to be done to build a future-ready technology platform.

Gaurav Gupta who has spent over a decade at Silicon Valley with start-ups and large organisations like Cisco and Symantec, was hired as Vice-President (Engineering) recently, to lead the company’s cloud platform and technology infrastructure.

Jeyandran Venugopal who has 16 years of experience, having built technology backbones at Amazon and Yahoo, was appointed Technology Advisor to help Snapdeal lay down the strategic tech roadmap for the future. Bhuvan Gupta with 15 years of experience was hired as Vice-President (Engineering) to build technology that will help the company realise its goal to enable a million merchants to sell online in three years.

Building a network

Stating that Snapdeal is a technology company at heart, Rohit Bansal, co-founder Snapdeal, who is an engineer himself, said, “We did not want to be just another retail-like company that buys and sells. We want to build a technology company that connects the humongous base of small businesses and merchants who are present in large cities and small towns of the country and connect them to millions of consumers who want to buy their products, but have no avenue to do that today.

“In a short span of 3 years since we started our online marketplace, we along with our rockstar tech team of 1,000 engineers, have built a platform which now touches and brings joy to millions of businesses and consumers.”

Snapdeal is one of the top three e-commerce players in the country along with Flipkart and Amazon. “India is a highly consumption driven society where 70 per cent of the GDP is consumption-led. This means $1.4 trillion of consumption happens every year. Through our digital commerce platform and ecosystem, our goal is to make this consumption more efficient through online medium,” said Bahl.