Flipkart hires honchos from Amazon, Google, Microsoft

Leading e-retailer Flipkart on Tuesday announced it hired senior executives from its rival Amazon, search engine Google and global software major Microsoft by scouting for best talent on a global scale.

"Dan Rawson from Amazon has joined as head of customer logistics and supply chain ecosystems, Ravi Byakod from Google as director of engineering and Anand Lakshminarayana from Microsoft as head of product management for digital goods and services," Flipkart said in a statement here.

Rawson will oversee customer delivery solutions, leading product, business, and operations teams to advance the way the company uses technology to expand delivery while maintaining an excellent experience for consumers.

"Rawson has proven leadership skills in an array of situations. His operational expertise and passion for tackling challenges will be an asset for us," said chief product officer Punit Soni.

A former US Marine, Rawson was general manager of fulfillment, North America at Amazon's Seattle office. He also worked at Dell Computers before joining Amazon.

"Byakod's background in building large-scale distributed sy stems at Google will enable us to develop a flexible accounting platform on new architecture at scale," said Flipkart chief technology officer Peeyush Ranjan.

Byakod served as Google's head of engineering for technology and solutions team, developing data warehouses, customer relationship management programmes and partner engineering solutions from its Mountain View, California, headquarters.

"Lakshmnarayanan, who worked at Microsoft India's development centre in Hyderabad, will lead expansion of our digital product offerings," said Soni.

Lakshminarayanan holds six US patents, MS degrees in computer science and engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and an MBA from the University of Washington.