As ClearTax, the financial technology startup, is scaling up the engineering team, it has roped in ex-Director of Engineering and two senior engineers from Flipkart. A person close to the matter revealed, ClearTax is trying to recruit another director level executive from Flipkart.
Prasanth Nair, a former director at Flipkart has joined the Bengaluru-based company as vice president-engineering. Jai Santosh, who led Flipkart Lite team, and Aakash Bapna, who worked at Flipkart from 2011to 2014, will also be joining.
ClearTax, which runs an income tax returns e-filing website, is planning to increase the number of engineers in its technology team fourfold to 100 in the next six months or so. At present, the total head count at ClearTax is 100.
ClearTax is adding products and services, which would make it a one-stop shop for all financial needs of customers (both retail and business). The company is focusing on building products and markets for new offerings to SMEs (small and medium enterprises) and businesses, and expansion of current customer base by entering new geographies.
Nair will lead the product and technology group at ClearTax. At Flipkart, he was instrumental in scaling up the fulfilment platform. Besides Flipkart, in the past 16 years he has worked with companies including Yahoo!, Travelocity and Amazon.
Bapna was instrumental in building and scaling up Flipkart’s front-end systems and teams from scratch. In 2014, he moved on to start his own venture, Pecfly, a consumer-to-consumer marketplace.
Santosh was with Flipkart since 2014, as part of the core part and led the team which built Flipkart Lite, a progressive web app.
The top level churn in e-commerce
Just four months into 2016 and Indian e-commerce majors -Flipkart, Snapdeal, Jabong, Paytm among others – are grappling with an exodus of management-level executives.
All have been aggressively recruiting top talent – including big-ticket Silicon valley veterans – with the millions of dollars they have raised. Retaining them, however, has not been so easy.
While employee movement is common to any business, experts believe that the pace at which it’s happening in the e-commerce space indicates challenges related to the organisational structure, expectations from employees, young leadership and lack of robust strategies.
Consider Flipkart, India’s biggest e-commerce player valued at more than $15 billion, which is currently struggling with major exits at the top level. At least four senior executives have quit Flipkart over the past four months. In 2015, a total of 16 senior executives quit Flipkart and its lifestyle e-tailing unit Myntra. While some moved on to take up senior positions in other tech startups, some donned the entrepreneur’s hat.
Recent among these departures is Punit Soni, Flipkart’s high profile catch from Silicon Valley, who joined the team as Chief Product Officer a year ago.
ClearTax is trying to recruit another director level executive from Flipkart
Must Read
