Bigcommerce makes some big name hires as growth amps up

Bigcommerce, which looks set to be one of Australia’s startup success stories, today announced three senior hires in San Francisco, brought in to support the expansion of the Bigcommerce platform and rapid growth in number of merchants and online sales.

New hires include: Steve Corona, principal architect; Scott Baker, head of site reliability and operations; and Kei Tang, head of quality engineering. In the past year, the company has seen 100% year-over-year revenue growth, increased the number of online stores from 35,000 to 55,000, and is approaching $4 billion in total online sales across merchants.

Corona joins Bigcommerce as principal architect. He is the former CTO of TwitPic where he helped them become one of the most heavily used independent services for sharing images on Twitter, with over 50 million users and 4 billion photos. More recently, he was head of platform at Life360, where he architected the core APIs that serve as the backbone of the service. Corona is also author of the popular book Scaling PHP.

Baker joins Bigcommerce as head of site reliability and operations. He most recently was director of systems engineering and operations at Eventbrite, where he was responsible for taking eventbrite.com to 99.99% availability, during a time when the company announced it had processed $2 billion in gross ticket sales. Prior to that, he was vice president of operations at Digg, where he was also a frequent speaker on monitoring website performance and web technology trends. He has been a keynote presenter at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara.

Kei Tang joins Bigcommerce as head of quality engineering. He spent seven years at Salesforce.com, most recently as director of quality engineering, where he scaled SaaS/PaaS services from being able to handle millions of transactions a day to over one billion per day. Tang was responsible for delivering Salesforce’s Analytics real-time reporting and dashboard features on sales, service, custom apps, and third-party data during a time when the company grew from almost $500 million to over $3 billion in revenue.

Bigcommerce president Steve Power says the company has experienced tremendous growth over the past few years.

“We’re making the necessary investments in top talent to support and further build out our efforts on all fronts,” Power says. “Steve, Scott and Kei are industry heavyweights – recognised experts in their respective fields – who will make a real impact at Bigcommerce as we continue to innovate our platform and help businesses sell more online.”

These new hires join the almost 200 people Bigcommerce has brought on since the beginning of the year, including more than 56 in San Francisco and 125 in Austin.