Excl: Snapdeal ramps up hiring with IIT, IIM passouts; eyes 200-strong tech team by year-end

Snapdeal.com, one of the fastest growing e-commerce sites in the country, is all set to ramp up its tech and engineering division and eyes a 200-strong team by the end of 2012.

Talking exclusively to Techcircle.in, Amitabh Misra, vice-president (engineering) at Snapdeal, said, "When I joined the company in October 2011, ours was a small tech team of 10 with sub-segments like engineering, testing and IT support. Since then, we have built it fast in terms of hiring and product development."

As of now, Snapdeal has a tech team of 105 and intends to hire 22 more in the next couple of weeks. By the end of this year, Misra will have a total of 200 members in his team. Interestingly, Snapdeal is one of the few companies which has one HR team dedicated to tech recruitment and it reports to Misra.

Earlier this year, the e-tailer has hired 30 freshers from various IITs and IIMs across the country. "Now we intend to go to other top-notch engineering and management institutes as well," said Misra.

Without disclosing the salary bracket, he said, "When we went to IIT Kanpur this year, it was just the third day of campus recruitment. So one would be able to guess the kind of salary we had offered.

"We went to those institutes because we knew we would get top-notch talents with ambition, attitude, domain knowledge and entrepreneurial zeal to work for a steadily growing startup," explained Misra.

But for mid-level recruitments, Snapdeal relies upon the reputation of the company or companies where the prospect has worked and also on his/her educational background. Other than that, the company depends heavily on referrals. "We also have regular performance reviews in place for professional growth and salary hike," added Misra.

Talking about his role, Misra said, "Everything that is required to build the backend of Snapdeal (apart from the IT infrastructure) is my team's responsibility. We put in place smooth processes for orders, shipping, logistics development and running of the website."

Snapdeal's tech team is divided into several groups such as the software development team (comprising 60-65 people, along with 7-8 managers) and the QA (quality assurance)/testing team (includes 15-17 people). Another group of programme managers, whose work mainly involves planning and delivery for the software engineering team, has a couple of people right now, but more people will be hired soon. There is also the production support and build-a-release team which compiles the software and deploys it.

"Right now, we are building a tech team which can support backend of various categories, comprising 15 million products," informed Misra.

"As of now, Snapdeal may not foray into other categories. Our focus will be increasing the number of products in existing categories like electronics, sports, books and apparel," he added before signing off.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)