Zerodha has hired only 5 employees for its tech team in 4 years, says CTO Kailash Nadh

Kailash Nadh, CTO, Zerodha

The country's leading online stock trading firm Zerodha’s hiring strategy remains highly selective, with the company bringing in just five new employees for its tech team in the past four years, Chief Technology Officer Kailash Nadh has said.

Speaking about Zerodha’s team-building approach, Nadh said the company's emphasis is on maintaining a close-knit, collaborative work environment over rapid expansion. "We’ve hired about 5 people in the tech team in the last 4 years in total, with 3 in the last year. The total strength is now 35 members in the tech team," Nadh told Moneycontrol.

Only two of Zerodha’s 35-strong tech team have left in the past 10 years, Nadh had said earlier. When asked about the strategy that has worked, he said Zerodha does not even use the word talent. “It is a group of people who hang out with each other, who have the right philosophies, who gel well with each other,” the CTO said.

The company’s culture focuses on human decency and building relationships. “There is really no real formula,” he said.

Read the full interview here

Companies start hiring “like crazy” because that becomes a de facto growth metric. “Software teams used to be lean 10-15 years ago. Startups did not have the tendency to hire hundreds of programmers,” Nadh said.

A company can maintain its existing framework and grow while having a small team.

"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. 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," he said.

Also read: Most tech jobs in IT services can be automated with generative AI: Zerodha CTO

The comments assume significance as the online platform has faced tech glitches in the past, with traders venting their frustration on social media.

On June 3, Zerodha’s platform malfunctioned on a day of market surged to new highs, coinciding with exit polls predicting a third term for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“This (Zerodha's technical glitches) perception problem is mostly because of Twitter," Zerodha CEO Nithin Kamath recently said.