Flipkart announces key appointments as it gears up to take on rivals

Flipkart has been luring key staff from major rivals as it strengthens its team to take on rivals Amazon, Snapdeal and Paytm in India

It has hired Dan Rawson from the  US operations of global rival Amazon to head its customer logistics and supply chain and filled a key gap in its payment systems team by hiring Ravi Byakod, a senior Google engineer who had had been involved in building the Google Payment Gateway and apps hosting platform, as director of the engineering-accounting platform.

Byakod will head the team tasked with the building an accounting platform for both existing and new initiatives. Anand Lakshminarayanan, a Microsoft executive, had been appointed head of product management for digital goods and services.

Lakshminarayanan had earlier built MSN products in the health, fitness, sports and money segments and prior to that he was group product manager at eBay. The three new executives will  be based in India, Flipkart said.

The recent past had seen Flipkart announce several top-level appointments. The company had six months ago appointed Punit Soni as  chief product officer. Another key appointee Eric Lange, had managed analytics and publisher products for Yahoo!'s ad business.

Flipkart, valued at $15 billion, was behind smaller rivals Snapdeal and Paytm in owning a payment system that also worked as a wallet.

''His (Dan's) operational expertise and his passion for tackling big challenges will be a tremendous asset as Flipkart's rapid expansion continues. I look forward to working with him to deliver great service for millions of Flipkart customers in the months and years to come'', said Punit Soni, chief product officer.

''Ravi's background in building large-scale distributed systems will enable us to develop a flexible accounting platform on new architecture at scale,'' said Peeyush Ranjan, CTO and head of engineering.

''We are very excited to have Anand join us in Bangalore,'' Soni said. ''We believe that over the next few years the consumption of digital goods and services in India will become mainstream, and Anand's experience creating high-value digital products in both the US and India will be extremely valuable.''