Calendly Appoints Former Meta, PayPal Executive Jigar Desai as CTO

Calendly, the only centralized scheduling automation platform built for scaling across the organization, today announced the appointment of Jigar Desai as its Chief Technology Officer. Desai brings more than 25 years of experience leading product and engineering teams at startups and global tech companies. He will lead the engineering, quality assurance, and security teams, as well as shape Calendly’s product roadmap.

“Calendly is a dream product for a tech enthusiast because it solves a real problem workers in nearly any role, in any industry, and at any company face,” said Desai. “I’m inspired by the team’s relentless focus on customers and ability to build intelligent, trusted scheduling solutions that are changing how people define productivity and approach meetings.”

Desai was most recently the Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering at Sisu, a decision intelligence engine. Prior to Sisu, he spent nearly five years as Senior Director of Product and Engineering at Meta, formerly known as Facebook. There he spearheaded a ground-up effort to ideate a new machine learning operations platform for common AI use cases for ads, content integrity, and video, as well as managed large scale data analytics platforms. He also spent nearly 13 years at PayPal and eBay, where he held various roles and was responsible for product development and infrastructure.

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“Jigar has an impressive background of technical, cross-disciplinary expertise and a track-record of building and retaining great teams, both of which will help us to accelerate our market leadership,” said Calendly CEO and Founder Tope Awotona. “He will play an essential role in helping us implement AI into our product, apply data to our operations in new ways, and scale adoption among teams and organizations of all sizes.”

Desai’s addition comes at a significant time as more businesses look to digitally transform workplace processes and improve productivity. To help workers and companies be more effective with managing meetings, this year Calendly released new solutions and integrations for sales and marketing teams including Calendly Routing and Calendly for Gong Engage; more intuitive scheduling settings for meeting types; and IT-governed account security features with Domain Control. Desai will support the strategy and implementation of Calendly’s AI-powered scheduling solutions coming in early 2024.

SOURCE: Businesswire