Twitter India closes Bengaluru engineering centre, impacts staff

Twitter India, part of the popular micro-blogging platform Twitter, has decided to wind up engineering work at its development centre in Bengaluru, impacting half of its workforce.

In a written reply to queries dent by DH, a spokesperson from Twitter India stated that the decision is part of the normal business review, and has decided to stop the global engineering work at the Bengaluru development centre.

“Engineering is a key part of our global company, and we continue to focus our programmes and efforts on improving the core product experience for our users, worldwide. We thank the ‘impacted’ individuals for their valuable contributions, and are doing as much as we can to provide them a respectful exit from our company,” stated the spokesperson. Twitter India has multiple offices and their operations include sales support to marketing, to media partnership, to business development, and to other areas. Only the Bengaluru office has engineers. The company didn't reveal the split of employees.

The spokesperson also made it clear that Twitter remains committed to India as a strategic market for users, partners and advertisers. “Today, India is one of our fastest growing markets worldwide, and we continue to invest in key initiatives to further expand our audience, increase user-engagement, and drive revenues in this important market,” the spokesperson stated.

The spokesperson also revealed that over 80% of Twitter users are on mobile, and the company offers a mobile advertising platform to businesses of all sizes in India, from brand marketers to SMB advertisers. “Video is the main advertising product for Twitter, which provides the highest engagement and return on investment (ROI) for marketers,” the spokesperson stated.

San Francisco-based Twitter acquired Bengaluru-based mobile startup ZipDial for around $40 million in 2015, which helped it set up an engineering centre here, with the help of the ZipDial’s 50 employees.

Though the company pruned the team, it later added more Android developers, a media partnership manager, a site reliability engineer and support engineers. Valerie Wagoner, the CEO of Zipdial, was heading the centre initially.