The newly-appointed chief product officer Anand Chandrasekaran of Snapdeal is quite tech savvy. The proof is his suggestion of doubling Snapdeal’s engineering team to over 2,000 this year. The online marketplace firm intends to be a technology, product and engineering-driven company under the leadership of Chandrasekaran.
As per a news report by The Economic Times, Chandrasekaran, an ex -Bharti Airtel, is building the engineering team, besides attracting top talent to Snapdeal at a time when the company is fiercely competing with rivals Flipkart and Amazon. The expansion of the engineering team also comes when Snapdeal, through a series of strategic acquisitions, has signalled its ambition to build a services platform to stand out in an online marketplace.
"We might even go beyond 2,000 people in the team, knowing that we have had a four-fold growth in our overall manpower over last year. We now have over 5,000 people," Chandrasekaran told the ET.
Chandrasekaran, who is also leading Snapdeal's technology initiatives in payments and cloud, said the company is trying to attract the best talent available in the country and abroad. "We don't think of talent on the basis of what problem we are solving, rather we think of who is the best talent in the country and let's have them in Snapdeal to build better products," he said. Snapdeal is considering setting up a base in the US, in its efforts to strengthen its technology arm, hire more specialists and become the first Indian consumer interncompany to establish a presence in the world's biggest startup hub. The company is also looking at offering services from utilities payments, mobile and DTH recharges to financial products, confirms the ET news report.
(Image: Reuters)