India eCommerce startups raid Silicon Valley for talent

In a reversal of the brain drain where Indian engineers headed to Silicon Valley tech firms, a Forbes article notes that India’s thriving homegrown e-commerce startups are increasingly trekking in the other direction in search of top-notch talent for opportunities back home.

Rohit Bansal, co-founder and COO of Snapdeal (which is backed by SoftBank, BlackRock and eBay among others), told Forbes he was in Silicon Valley to recruit up to a dozen executives for their operations in Bangalore and New Delhi. Bansal said his firm is looking to ramp up talent in three distinct areas:

  • Product management experts who can help build products,
  • Design engineers who can design for first-generation mobile internet users, and
  • Engineering architects who can help handle the massive scale.

In addition, Forbes noted:

  • Flipkart, India’s biggest online retailer and Snapdeal rival (backed by Tiger Global and Naspers), has hired two Google engineering VPs, Peeyush Ranjan and Punit Soni.
  • Myntra, a Flipkart fashion portal subsidiary, has said its looking for talent in Silicon Valley.
  • Zomato, a restaurant discovery portal, has hired Namita Gupta, Facebook’s Engineering Partner for Games, as its chief product officer.
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