Online marketplace Flipkart has appointed Punit Soni, a Google product management executive and former vice president of product management at Motorola, as its new chief product officer, reports the Economic Times.

Soni will lead the product definition and innovation charter for Flipkart consumer products, marketplace and transaction platform. In this role, he will be driving product strategy, design and product marketing functions.

Soni will report to Mukesh Bansal, chief executive officer of the commerce platform at Flipkart. Mukesh earlier this week hired a McKinsey director, Saikiran Krishnamurthy, as the chief operating officer of the commerce division. Soni becomes the third top lateral recruitment by the firm after Krishnamurthy and Sanjay Baweja, who joined as CFO from Tata Communications three months ago.

"Punit is a proven product and technology leader with very significant contribution to Google mobile products and at Motorola," Bansal told the Economic Times. He described Soni as "a thought leader in cutting edge consumer product design." 

Soni was quoted in a report as saying, “India is the next centre of tech innovation and growth globally, and I am excited to participate by moving to Bangalore for Flipkart. The next world-class technology company will come out of India, and it will be Flipkart.”

As a senior product leader at Google and Motorola in Mountain View, California, Soni was involved in the development of some of the world’s most revolutionary products including Google News, Google Books, Google Plus, Google Mobile and a suite of Motorola devices including Moto X, Moto G and Moto E.

Soni holds an undergraduate degree (B.Tech) in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra, a masters degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wyoming and an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.