Snapdeal hires ex-Twitter exec Rahul Ganjoo

Online marketplace Snapdeal has appointed former Twitter executive Rahul Ganjoo as vice president of its technology team, as it looks to boost its engineering skills to compete with rivals including Flipkart and Amazon.

"My focus will be on institutionalising best of breed product development practices to ensure Snapdeal is a world-class engineering organization. I am looking forward to contributing to Snapdeal's vision of creating the most impactful digital e-commerce system by closing the gap between strategy and execution," Ganjoo said on his appointment.

Ganjoo is a computer science graduate from Pune Institute of Computer Technology and a postgraduate in software engineering from BITS, Pilani. Prior to Snapdeal, he spent more than two years at microblogging site Twitter's San Francisco headquarters. At Twitter, he worked on solving high visibility problems such as large scale spam and targeted abuse, as per a press statement.

Ganjoo has also worked at companies such as Six Apart, Symantec, Thoughtworks and Wipro Technologies, where he built program management teams and led the execution of large-scale programs.

Snapdeal, run by Jasper Infotech Pvt Ltd, has hired several executives lately from top Indian and multinational companies to strengthen its operations. It recently named former Adobe executive Rajiv Mangla its chief technology officer.

It had also hired Hardeep Singh as the head of infrastructure. Singh was the third employee from Bharti Airtel to join Snapdeal. Early this year, it had hired Anand Chandrasekaran and Govind Rajan as the chief product officer and chief strategy officer, respectively.

The company also hired former Procter & Gamble executive Amit Choudhary as its senior vice president of corporate finance; Gaurav Gupta as VP of engineering; Jeyandran Venugopal from Yahoo as technology advisor; Bhuvan Gupta as VP of engineering; and Vivek Patankar as senior vice president of finance from Unilever.

Snapdeal recently raised $500 million (Rs 3,250 crore) in fresh funding led by iPhone contract manufacturer Foxconn, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and existing investor SoftBank.