Flipkart hires former Twitter executive Tarun Jain

Flipkart, the country's largest e-commerce venture, has appointed former Twitter executive Tarun Jain as the head of products for its advertising group.

Jain will be responsible for driving the group's business strategy, product vision, product roadmap, execution, partnerships and customer adoption, a Flipkart spokesperson told Techcircle.in.

He will report to Ravi Garikipati, Flipkart's senior vice president and entrepreneur-in-residence.

In his most recent role, Jain was group product manager at Twitter in the San Francisco Bay Area where he led product vision, strategy, development and execution across a number of products including founding Twitter Commerce and leading projects like Direct Response and Ads Marketplace.

Previously, he worked with Google as lead product manager where he started and scaled new products including AdWords Express, Dynamic Ads, Google Offers and Google Shopping. Before Google, he was with Microsoft as a product manager on the Bing project.

In the past few quarters, Flipkart has been strengthening its upper deck by hiring seasoned executives across functions. The hiring is a sign of the intense competition that is brewing among India's top e-tailers to gain an edge in the highly competitive sector.

Earlier this month, Flipkart had appointed MakeMyTrip's chief technology officer Sharat Singh as vice president of engineering. Last month, it hired Ram Papatla from rival Amazon India as vice president of product management and named Samardeep Subandh chief marketing officer.

It also made three senior-level appointments to strengthen delivery, accounting technology and digital product capabilities. Flipkart appointed Amazon's Dan Rawson as head of customer logistics and supply chain ecosystems, Google's Ravi Byakod as director of engineering – accounting, and Microsoft's Anand Lakshminarayanan as head of product management for digital goods and services.

Besides, Punit Soni joined as chief product officer in March from Google and Peeyush Ranjan, another Google employee, joined as head of engineering.

Flipkart has also seen a number of senior-level exits recently. Chief people officer Mekin Maheshwari moved to an advisory role while Ravi Vora, who was CEO of Flipkart's Strategic Brands Group, exited the company in September. In August, the CEOs of Appiterate and AdIQuity, startups acquired by Flipkart earlier this year, moved on from the company.