Harish Sivaramakrishnan joins Snapdeal as VP, design

He will lead the design teams across the company's portfolio of products and build a design studio across Delhi and Bengaluru offices.

Snapdeal, an online marketplace, has brought on board Harish Sivaramakrishnan as vice president, design. He will lead the design teams across the company's portfolio of products and build a design studio across the Delhi and Bengaluru offices. This is an expansion of his current role at FreeCharge where he is currently heading the UX, design and the front-end engineering teams. He will now play a key role in product design as Snapdeal turns its focus to building a world-class technology platform with the most intuitive web and mobile interface.

Sivaramakrishnan joined FreeCharge in 2013 as head of design and UI engineering. Previously, he has also served as the user experience architect at Myntra, where he was responsible for the entire user interface architecture across web and mobile. Additionally, he also played an active role in conceptualising future-looking offerings of Myntra, working closely with teams across engineering and product management. Prior to joining Myntra, he has spent a decade at Adobe in Bengaluru and San Francisco, working on a diverse set of products in engineering, product and design capacities.

Sivaramakrishnan holds a Bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani. He is also a well-recognised musician and part of the acclaimed band 'Agam'.

Speaking about his appointment, Sivaramakrishnan says, "Snapdeal's growth in the technology space has been unprecedented, and it gives me great pleasure to be a part of this young and energetic team. Over the years, I have been extremely passionate about building great consumer experiences in the Indian e-commerce space. I was fortunate to have gotten the opportunity to bootstrap the FreeCharge design team and now look forward to building a uniform design sensibility across Snapdeal's entire digital commerce ecosystem."

Anand Chandrasekaran, chief product officer, Snapdeal, adds, "Great design is as much form as it is function. At Snapdeal, we strive to deliver the best buyer and seller experiences and are thrilled to make design an integral part of our approach to product development. In India, design is yet to get its due recognition. We are extremely excited to have Harish on board and wish him a great journey ahead with the Snapdeal family. Our consumers and sellers will be the beneficiaries of our endless debates as we endeavour to get to pixel perfection."

The technology team at Snapdeal claims to be 1000-people strong currently and the company is looking at doubling it by the end of this year. The company has significantly ramped up its technology leadership team and has hired senior leaders from across the globe. Chandrasekaran, ex-CPO, Bharti Airtel, Gaurav Gupta, formerly India head of Scalearc, Amitava Ghosh, ex-CTO, TaxiForSure, Viraj Chatterjee, ex-director, engineering, Adobe Systems and, most recently, Rajiv Mangla, ex-VP, engineering, Adobe Systems, have all joined Snapdeal as core members leading key functions within the product and technology team.

In February 2010, Kunal Bahl, along with Rohit Bansal, started Snapdeal which claims to be India's largest online marketplace, with the widest assortment of 15 million+ products across 500+ diverse categories from thousands of regional, national, and international brands and retailers. Snapdeal has partnered with several global marquee investors and individuals such as SoftBank, Alibaba, Foxconn, BlackRock, Temasek, eBay Inc., Premji Invest, Intel Capital, Sequoia Capital and Ratan Tata, among others.