Coinbase Global Inc. has appointed Google Pay’s Pankaj Gupta to head its upcoming India development centre. He will be vice president-engineering and site head for India, responsible for building the team here from scratch.

The Silicon Valley based crypto-currency exchange, which recently listed on the Nasdaq after a blockbuster IPO, plans to conquer startups for talent in the country.

"India has world-class tech expertise and some of the brightest minds in the industry. Coinbase plans to tap and develop this local talent,” Gupta, who was leading Google Pay’s engineering efforts in India and the Asia Pacific, stated in a blogpost. “Specifically, the plan is to hire hundreds of employees across all levels in engineering, product management, UX design, research and program management within the next 1–2 years to build out a full tech hub in India.”

Gupta is the founder of deeptech startup Halli Labs, which was acquired by Google in 2017 as the search giant looked to build products and solutions for the next billion users.

The Coinbase engineering centre in India would work in deeptech domains like blockchains, data engineering, infrastructure and machine learning. "Looking forward to building together the future of the global crypto economy from India," he wrote in his blog.