Meesho hires ex-Google director as VP of engineering

Homegrown ecommerce company Meesho announced the appointment of Divyesh Shah, who has joined as the company’s vice president, engineering.  

Shah will lead the supply, monetisation and fulfillment and experience (F&E) engineering teams at Meesho. He will lead strategies for using technology to build solutions to further enhance user experience on the platform, the company said. 

Shah joins Meesho with almost two decades of work experience, having worked at companies like Google as director of engineering and Uber as senior manager in the US. He started his career at Google building containers on Linux which are now utilized by most large Linux deployments, and later went onto build TV ads and Analytics for Google Fiber.  

More recently, his teams built the product platform for Google Assistant. In between these Google stints, he also worked at Uber where his teams solved complex problem statements related to Marketplace Health, AdTech Data & Measurement and Vehicle Solutions. 

“After spending the last 16 years working in the US, I was keen to return home and be a part of the Indian tech ecosystem. Of all the opportunities, Meesho stood out because of the scale at which it operates and the mission statement of democratizing e-commerce for everyone in India which also translates into the opportunity to serve a large underrepresented demographic. 

Shah completed his B.E in computer engineering from D. J. Sanghvi College of Engineering, in Mumbai and then and an M.S in computer science from the University of Buffalo, U.S. As one of India’s fastest growing startups, Shah said about Meesho that he “looks forward to understanding the behaviour and needs of a user base that stretches beyond the country’s first 50-100 million internet users.” 

The latest appointment will strengthen Meesho’s Tech leadership team as the company looks to onboard more users and increase its presence in India’s underserved markets, it said in a statement.  

Earlier this year, the company announced the appointment of Debdoot Mukherjee as Chief Data Scientist to help make the e-commerce marketplace smarter and more efficient with the use of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). 

On Wednesday, the Softbank-backed company said it has joined the government's Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) to help connect buyers with hyperlocal sellers, the pilot of which will be launched in Bengaluru to start with. 

ONDC aims to create an open e-commerce ecosystem to put an end to the Flipkart-Amazon duopoly in Indian e-commerce and facilitate online purchase of goods and services at competitive prices. With this Meesho becomes the fourth unicorn to join the government’s ONDC initiative, after Paytm, Dunzo and Shiprocket.