OLX Scouts for India's Top Talent in Machine Learning & AI

OLX, India’s largest online classifieds, has kicked off its “Code and the Curious” Hackathon to recruit India’s best coding talent, skilled in emerging and disruptive technologies across Machine learning, AI, and Data Science. The hackathon has already received 10,000+ registrations so far.

Organized in partnership with leading online technology and programming platform HackerRank, the recruitment drive consists of two parts - an online assessment challenge from July 22nd to July 27th 2017 followed by a live two-day hackathon session in Gurugram and Bengaluru on 5th and 12th August respectively.

Shortlisted candidates from the second round will undergo interviews for full-time roles at OLX across its global technology hubs in Buenos Aires, Berlin, Lisbon, and Gurgaon. The Hackathon is designed for data scientists, engineers, and coders. There is no participation fee for entering the Hackathon.

Said Varun Madan, Head of HR, OLX India, “One of the highlights of working at OLX is the opportunity to work on 40 others markets across the globe. India is known for its immense tech talent, and we thought it would be fitting to leverage this talent for other markets by recruiting specifically for those countries. ‘Be Open’ is one of our key values. We are open to learning from each other, sharing experiences, and even recruiting the best talent from across other OLX countries.”

“Innovation is a big focus for this year in order to provide a more friction-free user-experience. Our product and tech talent will play a central role in achieving this.

The Hackathon which is centred around Machine Learning aims to foster innovation, creativity, and original thinking. While the end-goal of the Hackathon is recruitment, we want to make the process fun.” added Madan.

OLX Group is present in more than 40 countries, and is the market leader in most markets including India. Globally OLX has more than 75 million monthly active users on its app . Globally, OLX also records more than 60 million new listings per month.

In India, OLX gets 3.4 billion page-views a month, with 90% of its traffic coming from mobile. It is also the number one buying + selling App in India on Google Play Store. In India it is the number one marketplace for pre-owned cars and motorbikes, mobile phones, household items with a strong presence in jobs and real-estate.

OLX has kicked off its “Code and the Curious” Hackathon to recruit India’s best coding talent, skilled in emerging and disruptive technologies across Machine learning, AI, and Data Science

Given the massive volume of data generated every day, OLX relies on cutting edge and state-of-the-art tools in machine learning, data mining, and artificial intelligence to deliver an enriching user experience. In September last year, OLX kick-started a new journey with the launch of its new mobile app. The new app completely transformed the classifieds experience with innovative industry-first features, which offered a seamless mobile experience to users by making the platform safe, secure, and more social. The new mobile App led to 50% reduction in Ad posting time with the help of the industry-first image-recognition feature which detects products on instant click.

OLX introduced the chat-first option, with restrictions on calling to build trust as the App does not make anyone’s phone number public. The new App also offers a hyperlocal experience by only showing listings in one’s vicinity. This makes the experience simpler with an enhanced sense of familiarity to make the platform safer.

More than one-third of the OLX workforce in India works in Technology and Product Development, and lead key projects across multiple markets. In the last few years, key members of the team have worked out of Lisbon, Berlin, Buenos Aires to lend their expertise to global operations. Globally, OLX has over 4000 employees working across 25 offices worldwide. The hackathon aims to scout for talent that will join these team across countries to support the product development initiatives of the company.

Participants can apply for the hackathon by registering at: https://www.hackerrank.com/code-and-the-curious