When you work with the best, you become the best - Maximising at Flipkart!

At Flipkart, we ensure to find a seat for everyone at the table. Over the years, this aspect of our culture has enabled us to build a team of maximisers, that when enabled with an equal opportunity to succeed, has transformed digital commerce in India. Inclusion is one of our key values, and is central to how we show up at work every day. Our strength lies in the diversity of our backgrounds, experiences, cultures and more!

In this edition of Meet The Maximisers, we bring you the story of Deepti Agrawal, Director of Engineering and a tenured Flipster who has been with us for 10+ years! She began her Flipkart journey as a Senior Software Engineer in our search engine marketing (SEM) platform team in 2011, and through a journey of roles where she worked on the service-ification and scaling of Flipkart’s public API layer, is now a leader in our Central Platforms team that’s responsible for handling business-critical PaaS services.

We spoke to Deepti to find out how she experiences Flipkart’s culture and how it has helped her build a successful and long-lasting career in the domain of tech. 

An Opportunity to ‘Leave a Mark’

At Flipkart, we pride ourselves in the fact that employees own and chart their own careers and growth paths. We asked Deepti what keeps her motivated to stay with Flipkart even after having already spent 10 years with us. 

"At Flipkart, the thirst for learning can be quenched constantly, and you get to witness the impact your work makes. Moving from one domain to another has felt like moving from one start-up to another. You come together with the team to experiment, learn and grow and redefine processes that keep up with the incredible scaling of the company. It keeps you going." - says Deepti.

As the Director of Engineering in our Central Functions team, Deepti leads a team that enables the Flipkart platform to scale seamlessly and is critical to business availability. The services provided by this team include managed data stores, object storage, messaging, security and compliance - and are used by the Flipkart private cloud and every Flipkart developer to build solutions on a daily basis. To Deepti, solving the deep tech problems that come with this line of work and impacting Flipkart’s platforms and services at its foundational level is the most exciting part of what she does. The positive environment at Flipkart where we enable every person looking for an opportunity to do path breaking work is something Deepti experiences, every day. 

"The advantages that let you leave your mark at Flipkart and grab exciting opportunities are autonomy, the excellent ecosystem and being able to work with the best courtesy of the leadership. As long as you deliver and are not hesitant to step out of your comfort zone, you get to take on audacious goals and new projects that are not necessarily your domain. Flipkart's huge appetite for risks and experimenting lets you do what you feel passionate about. The ecosystem here supports you through your challenges, successes and takes care of the logistics. To me, what takes it up a notch is that you could be the primary caregiver and have larger commitments outside of work, but you will always receive support and encouragement to try your hand at more. With this, I have also had the chance to work and be mentored by outstanding managers who have helped me with the right opportunities in my entire career here" - says Deepti about Flipkart’s ‘Leave a Mark’ culture. 

A Culture of Transparency and Enablement

At Flipkart, we pride ourselves in our culture and values that enable our leaders and managers to be approachable, transparent and enabling in their actions and communication. Flipsters are entrusted with big responsibilities and enabled and encouraged to find solutions to complex problems.

Deepti says - “I joined Flipkart in 2011 as a part of the SEM team and can vividly remember this day in 2012 when I was on-call for the website team. Suddenly, a lot of our systems started experiencing an inexplicable slowdown. We were not really sure what was going on and that’s when Amod, the then Flipkart CTO, himself came in to try and troubleshoot the issue. We realised that we’d been struck by the leap-second issue where the world clocks had been readjusted by 1 second and our systems could not deal with the change. Amod suggested that we should restart the entire fleet and left me with the responsibility of overseeing it. This kind of responsibility and trust was a game changer for me and enabled me to become even more confident in and proud of the work I was doing.”

A broad culture of transparency and openness which begins right from the CEO sharing his goals with the organization and managers laying out clear roadmaps to Flipsters across levels having the freedom to share their viewpoints on the strategy process, Flipkart’s fast-paced environment truly enables ambitious professionals like Deepti to build fulfilling careers. When asked what her advice for women professionals looking to build careers in technology and engineering would be, here’s what she had to say. 

"Don't hesitate to demand the best opportunities if you're giving it your best. Women are often very conscious about asking for better opportunities and keep themselves from seeking better. By investing in your learning continuously, you can maintain a balance between growing and experimenting. Do the work and stop worrying about the results, don't let it keep you back. What has helped me understand this is the freedom of ownership, customer-centricity, a bias for action, working around constraints and setting audacious goals at Flipkart. Along with being the cultural traits I resonate with, it became the air beneath my wings to accomplish more".

Living the Values of Inclusion

Inclusion is not just one of the core values we live by, but also the secret sauce that makes us successful. We’re committed to building an inclusive workplace through targeted interventions across the talent lifecycle, including attraction, engagement, and development while also simultaneously creating a culture of inclusion through focused policies, behaviours and training. Programs such as Inspired, Include, Make Your Mark, FlipForward and FlipMarch help us bring the best talent onboard - including women in technology, women in business, women returning from career breaks and veterans. These are supplemented with interventions focused on building an inclusive culture - such as EDAB (designed to offer sustainable professional and economic growth opportunities to PWD), Uncovering Unconscious Bias at the Workplace (a dedicated learning program to help understand and manage unconscious biases in the workplace), Mentoring Circles (initiative designed to give women access to senior leadership, influential peers, potential sponsors and network partners), Evolve (a program for women in supply chain focused on fostering an empowered mindset, capability development and coaching), and Mom on Board (a program designed to structurally enable Flipster women to grow in their careers by creating an ecosystem that supports them through their maternity journey).  

Deepti was a part of one such program launched recently - Catalyze. Catalyze is a structured learning intervention and ecosystem support that aims to target roadblocks that create unique challenges in women’s career advancement. This program offers a platform for women to engage, share stories and build an internal and external support network. Here’s what Deepti had to say about her Catalyze experience:

“The entire Catalyze journey with Dr. Niru has been an inspiring experience. Opening up to her as well as to each other in this group has made us all come close to each other. I had a lot of 'aha' moments in these sessions where I realized how a simple change in approach could change the way I handle situations. Got some helpful suggestions like calendarising things that are important which we keep postponing because we are always "busy". Being part of this journey has been eye opening in multiple ways, curating a plan of action for small behaviour shifts and celebrating those small little wins is my major takeaway, and I'm glad to have got this opportunity.”

Inclusion and Diversity however, has been both a journey of get and give for Deepti. While she’s been able to leverage some of Flipkart’s interventions to grow further in her career, she’s also been pivotal in supporting one of our external facing initiatives - Girls Wanna Code, through which Flipkart provides an training, internships and full-time opportunities for women students in some of the country’s leading women only engineering institutes. What started in 2019 as a hackathon in 3 institutes, has developed into a full-scale comprehensive mentorship and upskilling program that has expanded to 14 women-only engineering colleges and saw 5500+ participants in its third edition and saw 80+ Flipsters directly mentoring 200+ budding women engineers through dedicated learning journeys. Here’s what she had to say about the experience: 

“The number of women we’re hiring from campuses has improved significantly in the last 10 years. Expanding the entry-stage lends greatly to having more women in the CXO positions - a recent instance being Nandita Sinha, the new CEO of Myntra. We’re working on increasing the number of women in the engineering space as well, and a program like Girls Wanna Code (GWC) enables us to do just that. As a part of the I&D charter at Flipkart, I feel proud to have been part of teams that are able to mentor 2nd and 3rd year women students and encourage them to partake in even more dedicated programs, mentoring opportunities, competitions, networking opportunities and more! I’m glad that I am able to give back to the ecosystem that also encouraged me!”

We are always proud to have Flipsters like Deepti - a success story and an inspiration not just for Flipsters, but also for women starting and building their careers in technology. This Women’s Day, we’re happy to share her story of #BreakTheBias with the world. 

Get an opportunity to work with the best like Deepti in our engineering teams > Explore openings!