Publicis.Sapient announces two executive appointments to lead digital transformation

Publicis.Sapient has announced two key executive appointments from global retail and technology giants Tesco and Amazon, as it grows its capability to help clients build businesses of the future.

Tilak Doddapaneni has been hired into the newly-created position of Global Head of Engineering at Publicis.Sapient – joining from Tesco, where he was Online Engineering Director. Doddapaneni will join the Publicis. Sapient global leadership team and report directly to Nigel Vaz, Publicis Groupe Lead for Digital Business Transformation and CEO of Publicis.Sapient EMEA and APAC. Rakesh Ravuri, who has held a succession of senior engineering roles at Amazon, will join as Chief Technology Officer for programming languages and cloud and Global Head of Engineering for Retail. He will play a key leadership role in Publicis.Sapient’s extensive operations in India. Ravuri will report to Doddapaneni. Both Doddapaneni and Ravuri are Sapient alumni.

Doddapaneni and Ravuri are proven change agents in taking organisations to the next level of performance in engineering and will be pivotal ingredients in Publicis.Sapient’s strategy to drive the market for digital business transformation services.

The key executive appointments come as Publicis.Sapient expands its product engineering capability, vital to digital business transformation and the ability to help clients transform their business and create exponential growth, increase efficiency and create better experiences – through the rapid development of products and services that consumers expect in a technology-enabled world.

In his new role, Doddapaneni will lead the entire technology delivery community across Publicis.Sapient globally. In addition to client success and engineering and delivery excellence, he will focus on the talent development, performance metrics, and breakthrough engineering practices required by digital business transformation clients in their modern test and learn environments.

In his time at Tesco, Doddapaneni built a modern online engineering team spanning India and the UK, leading it to successfully launch Tesco Direct and Tesco’s marketplace, and rolling out a re-architected Grocery Home Shopping platform in the UK and international markets.

Ravuri, who joins Publicis.Sapient as one of the Chief Technology Officers and Global Head of Engineering for Retail, brings a wealth of knowledge in cloud platforms, service design and agile engineering gained as Director of Software Development at Amazon. Ravuri built the engineering team responsible for the software systems for Amazon’s new logistics business to launch ship.amazon, delivering millions of packages for its sellers.