Flipkart rejigs tech leadership team

Flipkart has revamped its technology leadership team, the second such restructuring this year in the tech vertical at India's largest e-commerce company by market share.

According to Mint, which reported the development, engineering head Peeyush Ranjan has been named the group chief technology officer.

Ranjan will now also oversee areas such as mobile technologies and machine learning at Flipkart and head technology strategy, the report said, citing an email sent to Flipkart employees on Thursday.

The move comes after The Economic Times, in March, reported that Flipkart had consolidated all its engineering teams under Ranjan. As part of  the overhaul, the engineering units of Flipkart's logistics and advertisement businesses started reporting to Ranjan, who was earlier heading only the engineering vertical.

The latest reshuffle has enhanced Ranjan's role at Flipkart.

Email queries sent to Flipkart in this regard did not elicit any response at the time of filing this report.

According to the Mint report, Flipkart has also hired former CTO of Micromax Informatics Ltd Ashish Agrawal as senior vice-president of engineering. Agrawal, who will join Flipkart this month, will oversee the engineering vertical concerned with consumer shopping experience. Earlier, he worked at Amazon for 14 years. He will report to chief executive officer Binny Bansal.

The Mint report also said that Hari Vasudev, currently the senior vice president of engineering at Flipkart, will lead the technology function of its e-commerce consumer facing marketplace and its logistics division Ekart. Vasudev will report to Binny Bansal and Saikiran Krishnamurthy, who heads Ekart.

The latest reshuffle comes in the backdrop of earlier reports which suggest that Flipkart is looking for synergy among its growing technology functions. It also assumes significance in light of the recent top-level personnel exodus.

Earlier this year, top Flipkart executives including chief products officer Punit Soni, chief business officer Ankit Nagori and head of its commerce platform and  Myntra founder Mukesh Bansal quit in quick succession barely months after the company underwent an organisational restructure when Binny Bansal took over as the CEO.

With growing pressure to focus on profitability and cut costs, the move could also be seen as an effort to bring in a nimble organisational setup. Flipkart has also reportedly been struggling to raise fresh funds at its preferred valuations. It has also found its valuation marked down multiple times by some investors.

Though Flipkart is still the largest Indian e-commerce firm by market share, Jeff Bezos-led Amazon has steadily been gaining market share over the months, having toppled Snapdeal from its second position. Amazon, which had earlier committed $2 billion for its Indian operations, committed an additional $3 billion during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent visit to the US a few days ago, signifying its aggressive intent to capture a considerable size of the Indian online retail market.

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