Why Zerodha hired only 5 techies in last 4 years? CTO explains

In a recent interview with Moneycontrol, Kailash Nadh, the Chief Technology Officer of India’s leading fintech company, Zerodha revealed their unique hiring strategy.

A surprising fact about the renowned stock trading firm came to light as Nadh disclosed they hired only five people in their tech team in the last four years.

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Why Zerodha prefer small teams?

He further clarified that it is the bonding between team members rather than the size that matters. Their firm prefers having small teams with proactive, collaborative members.

He remarked: "I think it is a misconception that the number of people in a tech or engineering team scales linearly with the organisation in terms of financial transactions or the number of users or revenue.”

Zerodha’s platform malfunctioned on June 3 coinciding with exit polls predicting a third term for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Ruling out any possibility of inefficiency in their tech team, Zerodha CEO Nithin Kamath earlier commented, “This (Zerodha's technical glitches) perception problem is mostly because of Twitter.”

In the past 10 years, only two of their 35-strong tech team have left. The CTO said the company does not use the word “talent”.

Instead, they focus on having a group of individuals with the right frame of mind who get along well with each other.

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The Zerodha CTO shared the idea that a company can stick to its current structure and still expand with just a small team.

He added, “It is absolutely possible for a really small team to build massive systems that scale to really massive numbers. For me, if an engineering team grows exponentially as the company and its business grows, that is a bit of an anomaly.”

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