Hyderabad : Snapdeal, India’s largest value-focused online platform, is looking to expand its technology team as it customizes its personalization and recommendation engine to align it closely with the buying habits and requirements of its users.

Snapdeal’s 2.0 strategy, launched in August 2017, has been a major success, leading to a 3X growth in business volumes at Snapdeal, while enabling a simultaneous reduction in costs by 90%. This resurgence also enabled Snapdeal to become the first e-commerce company in India to become cash flow positive, giving it the freedom to invest its earnings in growing the business.

A large part of this growth has come from Snapdeal’s rapid expansion into Tier 2 & Tier 3 markets. To cater to this, Snapdeal has grown its assortment of value-priced merchandise, including a deep selection of regional brands and seller branded products. Snapdeal is also the preferred digital platform as the huge range of unbranded goods, currently sold in the bazaars of India, starts to move online.

Replicating the buzz and excitement of offline bazaars, Snapdeal has also integrated various elements of contest and games for the online users, allowing them to win instant prizes as they browse the endless assortment on the platform.

To enable users to have an engaging and discovery led experience, the technology and product teams at Snapdeal have used various machine-learning tools to build a personalized home feed which is customized individually for each user. Snapdeal also uses personalization to power outbound email campaigns which highlight and recommend custom product sets to individual users.

 

Another technology tool developed by Snapdeal’s team allows the buyers to receive dynamic inputs based on the purchase of similar products by other users. Snapdeal is also looking at adding vernacular components to the buying experience.

The growing intensity and success of these technology initiatives have led Snapdeal to aggressively expand its technology & product teams. In 2018-19, Snapdeal hired nearly 150 new team members, mostly in the technology, engineering, product and design teams. The hiring attracted a blend of talent from premier institutions and experienced team members from companies like Flipkart, Zomato, Samsung, Airtel, Hike, MuSigma and others.

 

In the coming months, Snapdeal is looking to hire nearly 120 engineers who will work on various projects in the domains of machine learning, gamification, personalization, cloud agnostic production systems etc. The positions, at entry, mid and senior positions are for AI / ML, full stack, Java backend, and front end engineering.

The technology team is also helping Snapdeal to deepen its efficiency initiatives. Snapdeal is using its private cloud to rapidly build and test various features, which help improve the experience for users and also lower the cost of operations. Technology continues at the heart of Snapdeal 2.0’s success in driving growth, superior experience and more efficient operations.

 

Snapdeal’s sharp turnaround has also attracted a lot of ex-employees. In FY 2018-19, more than half of the new hires were former employees opting to rejoin across technology, supply chain, user growth, marketing and business verticals at Snapdeal.