Hike calls out to ex-Yahoo engineers with offers

NEW DELHI: India's only home bred instant messenger app Hike has called out to former Yahoo engineers with employment opportunities at the company which is fast expanding operations, even offering free iPads to those who get selected.

"One of the biggest issues we’re facing is not being able to develop killer, awesome features in Hike, fast enough," the company said in a blog post.

"There’s a lot to do, and not enough hands to do it all. We’re creating a massive, scalable server stack to handle billions of messages flowing through it every day in real time, serving tens of millions of users. And that’s growing every day," it added.

Hike is one of the fastest growing messaging apps with 35 million users in less than two years. During that time, it has raised $86 million, of which $65 million was raised from Tiger Global and Softbank recently.

"We have a really great shot at becoming the first mobile internet company from India to hit 100 million users," it added in the post where it asked engineers to come for server, develop mobile apps ( Android, iOS, Windows), web apps and other opportunities.

Hike is backed by Bharti Softbank, a joint venture between Bharti Enterprises and Japanese telecom firm Softbank Corp.

Hike competes with a plethora of instant messaging apps including Whatsapp with 600 million users globally and 60 million in India, besides Facebook Messenger, Viber, Google Talk, China’s We Chat, Japan’s Line and Nimbuzz in India.

It allows users without smartphones to communicate with other Hike users via free SMS, a feature that its rivals don’t offer but is critical in India where feature phones still account for 71% of overall sales. Hike also pays for the messages that non-Hike users send to Hike users through bulk messages that the company buys from various mobile carriers.