Flipkart to increase technology team's headcount by 50%

Flipkart will spend more on technology this year, as it ramps up its online capabilities, especially in mobile, thereby boosting the headcount of its technology and engineering teams by at least half. This comes at a time when India's largest ecommerce firm is locked in a battle for supremacy with arch rivals Amazon and Snapdeal.

"We continue to very heavily invest in the mobile space. Within the mobile space, there are so many sensors in your device that we're investing more and more in computer vision, speech recognition, location analysis," Flipkart CTO Peeyush Ranjan told. "As you invest in the science, you can utilise that in visual search, you can utilise that in similarity of t-shirts or clothes or whatever," said Ranjan who was hired late last year from Google.

As Flipkart goes into overdrive to improve the online experience, it is also looking to leverage newer technologies such as big data and machine learning. "We're investing in technologies on mobile, we are investing heavily in infrastructure — we have built the biggest data centre in India. And we are using that to understand a lot of data — big data and machine learning," said Ranjan, who ran the engineering group for Google's Android One Project, before joining Flipkart.

The company is now betting on a new breed of talent, especially in niche areas such as data science. Flipkart currently has about 1,000 people in its engineering unit and that figure could go up to as much as 1,500 in 2016, said Ranjan. "Mobile, infrastructure, productivity are the biggest areas. We are looking for a lot of data scientists," he said.

Ranjan also said while few features such as the chat application are only expected to remain on the app, there is a renewed thrust on desktop, citing offers and discounts that were introduced on desktop as well during the recent Republic Day Sale as an example of the desktop push.

"We are investing in our desktop to make sure that people who are coming over there are getting a good experience — in some things mobile is going to be further ahead," said Ranjan.

Last year, Flipkart and the group's fashion portal Myntra had decided to go mobile application only in what was seen as a highly debated and controversial move. And in order to push its mobile application downloads, Flipkart had decided to give big offers and discounts only on the app during the three-day sale in October 2015 called "Big Billion Days".

But the app-only strategy backfired, as rival Amazon India took leadership in desktop visits by December this year even as Flipkart said it maintains leadership in mobile traffic. Myntra decided to relaunch its mobile website earlier this month. While Flipkart had continued its desktop platform, it decided to launch a mobile browser experience through a web application called Flipkart Lite.

According to Ranjan, Flipkart Lite has 10 times conversion for installation as compared to the normal app.