Twitter appoints former Uber exec as director of engineering in India, announces expansion

Microblogging and social networking platform Twitter said on Tuesday that it has onboarded former Uber executive, Apurva Dalal, as director of engineering and has plans to expand its India presence.  

Based out of Bengaluru, Dalal will be responsible for strengthening the company’s engineering capacity and offerings for local and global audiences. He will become the senior most member of San Francisco, California headquartered Twitter’s engineering team to be based out of India, according to a statement. 

Calling India one of its priority and top growth markets, Twitter’s vice president of engineering Nick Caldwell announced the news: 

India is a priority market for Twitter, and also a world-class engineering talent hub. We are excited to welcome @MrApurvaDalal as Director of Engineering, under whose leadership we will continue our hiring expansion in Bengaluru. https://t.co/rIIrtxIJDZ

— Nick Caldwell (@nickcald) April 20, 2021

“India has always been a priority market for Twitter and drives significant growth for the company. In fact, as previously shared, Twitter in India recorded a 74% year-on-year monthly Daily Average User (DAU) growth in Q4 2020. In order to scale our reach and build a service that is truly for Indians and by Indians, we are investing in expanding our engineering team in the country,” said Manish Maheshwari, managing director of Twitter India in the statement. 

According to estimates by the Ministry of Electonics and Information Technology, Twitter has 17.5 million users in India.  

The India engineering team in Bengaluru was set up two years ago and includes roles in product development, research and design as well as data science and machine learning.  

Apart from the US and India, Twitter has dedicated engineering teams in UK, Canada and Singapore. 

The company, through its venture capital arm, Twitter Ventures, is also an investor in Mohalla Tech, the parent of local language social media platform ShareChat and short video app Moj. Twitter was in government crosshairs earlier this year due to account and posts criticising the Prime Minister in light of the farmer’s protest.