Flipkart beefs up its tech oversight; welcomes Dropbox's Agarwal on board

India’s largest e-commerce firm Flipkart has appointed Aditya Agarwal, who heads engineering at the US-based cloud storage company Dropbox, as an independent director on its board. He will be the second independent director on the Flipkart board, after MakeMyTrip co-founder and CEO Rajesh Magow.

Flipkart seems to have gotten serious after its ‘Big Billion Day’ mess; and with this appointment the e-tailer surely aims to beef up its tech oversight as technology was seen as the main reason behind the sale failure.

Agarwal, who was also one of the first engineers at Facebook, will share his deep technology expertise in order to support Flipkart’s growth strategy, Flipkart said.

More from Biztech

Future Group - Reliance Retail Deal approved by CCI RBI ban on cryptocurrencies takes effect; prohibition could force investors to tap the black market

Commenting on the appointment, Sachin Bansal, co-founder and CEO of Flipkart, said, “Aditya is one of the best technology minds in Silicon Valley today. With Facebook, Cove and now Dropbox, he is associated with building and driving some of the most innovative technology product companies in the world. Binny and I are very pleased to have him join the board.”

“His experience and expertise will be invaluable in helping us continue to build a world-class technology company out of India,” he added.

“Technology drives some of the biggest innovations in this world. I’m very excited to join Flipkart, which is building technology that can change the retail landscape of a country as complex as India - it’s an opportunity that has massive potential,” said Aditya Agarwal.

Aditya Agarwal is VP-Engineering at Dropbox. He oversees the different engineering teams including new product development, infrastructure, platform and operations. He came to Dropbox via the acquisition of Cove, a company he co-founded that was focused on improving group collaboration and communication.

Prior to Cove, Agarwal was the Director of Product Engineering at Facebook where he oversaw the development of core products such as News Feed, Search, Photos, Profile and Applications. At Facebook, he played an important role in helping to design and build core parts of the Facebook engineering infrastructure.

He holds Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.