Indonesian e-commerce company Bukalapak will expand the workforce at its Melbourne technology hub in Victoria, Australia by hiring 100 new employees in the next three to four years in a rare expansion of an Indonesian business in Down Under.
According to Bukalapak CEO Willix Hali, additional expert workers were needed in the company’s product, technology, data and design divisions, which include software engineering and data science.
“In the past years, we have increasingly been investing in talent outside Indonesia, and one of the countries that we were looking at is Australia,” he said in a webinar hosted by research institute Australia-Indonesia Center on March 7.
“[We are] looking for talent with experience in scaling software design, software architecture and so on,” he added.
First offshore technology hub
Bukalapak has set up the research and development center in Melbourne in September 2021 as its first offshore technology hub amid the push of the local government in Victoria to attract global companies to create jobs and bring innovation.
The center currently employs a team of senior-level engineers to focus on analytics, artificial intelligence and various research and development activities in the e-commerce space. Bukalapak is also exploring partnership opportunities with local universities.
“Melbourne’s tech ecosystem is an ideal base for Bukalapak to establish this tech hub, which enables Indonesia’s tech talent to work together with tech professionals from Australia and around the world,” Bukalapak’s president Teddy Oetomo said at the opening of the center last year.
“This diverse tech lineup will open up opportunities for upskilling and strategic collaborations to support Bukalapak better serve the ever-growing needs of the market,” he added.
Bukalapak was founded in 2010 as an online marketplace to enable small and medium enterprises go online and since has expanded to support smaller traditional family-owned businesses, or warungs, in Indonesia. The company is listed on the Jakarta stock exchange.