Top expats including Tareq Amin quit Reliance Jio

NEW DELHI: Several expats holding senior positions at the Mukesh Ambani-led 4G telco, Reliance Jio, have quit the company in a quick succession. Tareq Amin, Senior Vice President of Technology Development, Ayush Sharma, Senior Vice President of engineering and technology and Nikola Sucevic, Assistant Vice President and data science head have recently quit the company, people familiar with the development said.

Jio’s senior vice president, Aayush Bhatnagar, is now leading Amin and Sharma’s technology-related projects for the company, another person said.

A query sent to Jio didn’t elicit any response.


The exits take place as Jio seeks to expand beyond mobile phone services to tap areas such as the Internet of Things, for which it has launched a pan-India network in partnership with Samsung. The telco is also offering fiber-to-home (FTTH) broadband pilot services and it will soon launch it commercially.

Amin, who joined Jio in 2013, had been a prominent global face for Jio, having represented the telecom operator at various international platforms, including the Small Cell Forum.

At Jio, Amin was responsible for overseeing all aspects of the technology development and automation organization, including innovation, development, and operation. He served companies like Huawei and T-Mobile in the US before joining Jio in Mumbai, India.

Sharma, on the other hand, was brought on board from Silicon Valley as senior vice president of engineering and technology in January this year to drive the business around IoT and other technologies such as mobile edge computing, distributed artificial intelligence and blockchain.

Sharma had joined the company after working on his own venture, MotoJeannie, in the United States, and worked for telecom gear makers Huawei and Ericsson, and Cisco in the past in the US. At Jio, Sharma was building a team of engineers to deploy and develop new technologies.

Jio’s chief product and innovation officer, Rainer Deutschmann, had also left the company in September last year and is currently working as Chief Operating Officer at Dialog Axiata PLC in Sri Lanka. Caroline Seifert, Jio's chief brand, and design officer left the company in April last year after a stint of over two years.

Sucevic, who served Jio for over two years, was leading data analytics development in the area of radio coverage and capacity, network modeling, telecom data mining, and other R&D projects.

He has now joined Indonesia's PT Smartfren Telecom Tbk as Chief Data Scientist and Head of Analytics. Before Jio, he worked with telecom gear makers Ericsson and Huawei.