Flipkart hires Google’s Peeyush Ranjan as engineering head

Bengaluru: Continuing with its spree of hiring senior-level executives, Bengaluru-based e-commerce major Flipkart today said it has appointed Peeyush Ranjan, a former top executive at Google, as a senior vice president and its head of engineering.

Ranjan has worked with Google at its California headquarters for nine years and most recently managed the company’s Android One engineering group.

He has also managed Motorola’s value devices engineering group and was the managing director of Google India for research & development (R&D) earlier.

At Flipkart, Ranjan will work closely with Mukesh Bansal, who heads the company’s commerce platform.

“Ranjan’s experience managing Google’s engineering group in India and his expertise in mobile is a tremendous addition to Flipkart’s outstanding technology team,” Bansal said. “His passion for working on innovative projects will be extremely valuable as Flipkart takes shape as one of the world’s leading technology companies.”

The announcement comes just days after Flipkart announced appointments of three other top-executives. Last week, Flipkart said, Hari Vasudev, former vice-president at Yahoo, was appointed senior vice-president for engineering, information technology, and supply-chain analytics at the company.

K V Anand, former president, digital platforms, Hathway Cable &Datacom, was appointed as senior vice-president for customer experience and Manish Maheshwari, co-founder of txtWeb, a marketplace for text-based apps, joined Flipkart as vice-president and head of seller ecosystem.

Last month, Flipkart had brought on board former vice president of product management at Motorola and a Google product management executive Punit Soni as its chief product officer. Both Soni and Ranjan will move from California to Flipkart’s headquarters in Bengaluru, the company said in a release.

“Soni and Ranjan have worked closely together for Google and Motorola including on the launch of Motorola’s Moto G and Moto E devices, which were both highly popular in emerging markets including India,” Flipkart said.

Ranjan holds degrees in computer science from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur and Purdue University, and an MBA from the University of Washington.