After an exodus of the senior management from
the company over the past year, online marketplace Flipkart is now hiring to
strengthen its engineering team. The company will focus on hiring mid-management
employees in three core areas for engineering including mobile experience,
cloud infrastructure and personalization.
The renewed focus on hiring comes after a year
of high-profile exits from the company who were recruited during 2015. Close to
six senior vice-presidents and directors have left the company since January
when Tiger Global's Kalyan Krishnamurthy took over as chief executive officer.
Since January, the company has seen the return of old hands to helm key
operations for supply chain of mobile phones, grocery among others.
The current focus is on hiring engineers with
typically two to five years of experience, which is a key area of investment
for the company. Flipkart will also hire contract workers to strengthen the
operations of its captive logistics unit Ekart.Engineering will drive our innovation edge. The
assumption is that e-commerce industry is driven by capital, but it is
(actually) driven by innovation. We are proud to have a truly world-class
engineering function which is a source of innovation. The first investment is
to grow that," said Nitin Seth, chief operating officer of Flipkart.
We will strengthen the two to five-year
experience layer, with cutting-edge expertise. They will come from both India
and overseas as well," said Seth, adding that while focus on engineering
did not waver over the past year, the lay-offs in 2016 were done to improve
speed and efficiency rather than as a cost-cutting measure by the company
Apart from improving the experience on mobile,
the teams will focus on building the company's cloud infrastructure and focus
on research areas such as machine learning, natural language processing,
artificial intelligence and other areas of data science to make shopping on the
platform a personalized experience.
With about a billion-dollar coming its way as
part of the recent round of funding, the company is also looking to strengthen
its sourcing for key categories including lifestyle, large appliances and
furniture as well as the new category for grocery. The company, which has a
workforce of 7,800 employees on its rolls, has around 240 members in the top
management. This does not include the numbers for Flipkart-owned fashion
verticals, Myntra and Jabong.
In 2015, we made a big shift. There was a large
influx of new leaders and it got difficult for the company to fully absorb. The
Flipkart culture, which is a very distinct culture, got diffused with the size
and the suddenness of the change. When I joined last year, it was about
strengthening FK culture," said Seth.
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