EXCLUSIVE: CoinDCX plans to hire more than 2,000 people this year — and they are not just looking at coders

• Indian cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX is looking to grow its team by 10 times this year.
• In an exclusive interview with Business Insider, the company’s COO disclosed that the exchange can absorb 300 people tomorrow itself.
• CoinDCX is looking to hire across the board, from coders and developers to marketing and product development experts.

Indian crypto exchange, CoinDCX, is looking to grow its employee base 10-fold this year, given the phenomenal growth in the cryptocurrency sector in India.

The start-up, which became the first Indian crypto company to attain ‘unicorn’ status in August, may not be planning to launch an initial public offering (IPO) anytime soon but is steadfast in its intention to build its team from 300 to 3000.

And, the company is looking to onboard more than just coders. “We’re hiring across all roles — tech, non-tech, product, marketing, all of those. The team has already grown 15x this year [2021],” explained Gupta.

The company’s employee ratio has seen a growth of 230% from January to December 2021, with a 3:1 male to female ratio within the organisation.

Who is CoinDCX looking to hire?

Companies like CoinDCX are not pure-play blockchain. So while they do need coders and developers who specialise in languages like Solidity and Rust, they also have similar needs as any other company — marketing, operations, product development and consumer support.

Gupta estimates that the company has around 100 technology-related roles open, 15 in product development, and 20 to 30 each in marketing and operations. As CoinDCX continues on its hiring spree, it wants to ensure cross-mobility between teams. This means that you could join the marketing team but end up in a different department altogether.

“For example, somebody who leads payments products for us, joined initially as quality assurance,” explained Gupta. One critical way this happens is simply exposure. On the one hand, an employee is kept up to speed on their present skills. On the other hand, CoinDCX tries to ensure that they are also exposed to enough team members outside their regular function and are able to learn from that.

How is CoinDCX bridging the supply-demand gap?

According to the technology lobby group NASSCOM, India’s crypto-tech market is expected to hit $241 million by 2030, potentially creating 877,000 jobs. However, as things stand, not too many people are proficient in the skills that the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry requires.

Even so, according to data collected by Dappros in 2018, India had the second-largest number of blockchain developers in the world after the United States. And, the bigger potential lies within the overall pool of 5.8 million developers in the country, according to GitHub.

CoinDCX, as a crypto exchange, doesn’t have the infrastructure to create massive reskilling programs in-house in order to attract the right talent. However, that doesn’t mean that they can’t outsource the task.

“We’re engaging with a lot of ecosystem partners — general names — who are giving these courses to ensure that all of our talent gets access to quality reskilling initiatives that have been built by top class startups out there,” said Gupta.

Correction: We’re hiring across all roles — tech, non-tech, product, marketing, all of those. The team has already grown 15x this year [2021],” was incorrectly attributed to Ramalingam Subramanian, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at CoinDCX. It has been changed to Mridul Gupta, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at CoinDCX.

SEE ALSO:
Cardano rises as the crypto market battles ‘extreme fear’
Ark Invest's Cathie Wood points to El Salvador's bitcoin push as one way innovation is making people's lives better