Deliveroo, a global food delivery company, will open an India Engineering Centre in Hyderabad, joining overseas players such as Indonesia’s Gojek, Singapore’s Grab, and Japan’s Rakutan in establishing engineering offices in the country without operating here.
The centre will be staffed by a new group and will be an integral part of Deliveroo’s central technology organisation.
By the end of the year, the company expects to have over 150 engineers working in the areas of analytics, platforms, automation, and machine learning.
“This is going to be the largest technology hub outside the United Kingdom,” said Devesh Mishra, chief product and technology officer, who joined Deliveroo last year. “This is a massive opportunity for software engineers, data scientists, ML and AI engineers to work on some of the toughest challenges.”
Sashi Somavarapu, vice president of engineering, will lead the centre. He has previously led teams at Amazon, Jio Platforms, and Ford Motor Company. He will report to Mishra.
The team will focus on developing new application services to accelerate its grocery segment, rider proposition and improving network efficiency, delivering enhanced, scalable automation systems and fast consumer experiences.
“One of the reasons why we decided to set up an office in India is because of that. We are close to a competitive environment, entrepreneurial environment, which will teach our engineers to be more innovative, productive, and learn from what is going around,” said Somavarapu. “Competition is all over the map. We don’t really consider that as a hurdle for us to enter this market.”
William Shu and Greg Orlowski created Deliveroo in 2013. It has approximately 800 sites in 11 countries, including Australia, Belgium, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and the United Kingdom.