Snapdeal to go on a hiring spree by year-end

Move a contrast to its decision in February to put 200 employees on notice

Delhi-based e-commerce company Snapdeal, which competes with Flipkart and Amazon, is planning to add 450 engineers to its technology and products teams by the end of this year.

This is in contrast to Snapdeal's move in February to put 200 employees on notice. These employees were told to undergo a 30-day performance improvement plan, which led to mass protests and a plea to Delhi's deputy labour commissioner.

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• Snapdeal eyes 20 mn daily transacting users by 2020

The company has about 1,600 engineers. Snapdeal is integrating its marketplace and online payments while offering new services like travel bookings and food, and needs more engineers to handle backend operations.

Snapdeal plans to ramp up the number of daily transacting users to 20 million by 2020, for which it has launched a platform in 11 languages, Findmystyle, an advertisement platform, Snaplite, and the Sherpalo seller panel. Recently, it also launched services in partnership with Zomato, Cleartrip and Redbus.

It has also in the last one year hired many senior executives in its technical and product teams, including Anand Chandrasekaran as chief product officer and Rajiv Mangla as chief technical officer. In addition, Snapdeal acquired Reduce Data, Letgomo and Martmobi, which all lead special technology projects for the company.

"Our technology platform is key to building the most reliable commerce system of the country. Over the last year, we have received fabulous response to Snaplite and the multilingual platform. We will strengthen our technology team this year and expect to add 450 people to our product and engineering teams," Mangla said.

Earlier, Rohit Bansal, co-founder, had said the online marketplace would expand, making its digital interface more interactive.

"We want to make e-commerce a daily habit and for that, the experience has to be seamless. We will focus on removing all the unreliability from e-commerce," he said.