Niki Kinjawadekar

Global Talent Partner | Ex-Grab, foodpanda & Shopee | APAC Tech & Product Talent Leader | Employer Branding & Hiring Strategy | ATS Specialist

Singapore, Singapore

About

I’m a strategic Talent Acquisition Partner with 7+ years’ experience scaling high-performing teams across APAC, Europe, and the US. specialising in Product, Tech, and Leadership hiring for some of the region’s most exciting companies, including Grab, Foodpanda, Shopee, and high-growth fintechs. At Foodpanda, I led the APAC ATS transformation project and reduced time-to-hire from 97 to 21 days. At Grab, I closed over 60% of headcount within 6 months, navigating COVID-era challenges with agility. Beyond recruiting, I’ve built pipelines, managed employer branding campaigns, emceed at global events like Money20/20, and led training for stakeholders across 11 APAC markets. Now, I’m looking to partner with forward-thinking companies that need not just a recruiter, but a strategic talent advisor who can align hiring with business outcomes. 📬 Let’s connect if you’re scaling a team, launching a new market, or fixing a broken hiring process.

Experience

  • Lead Delivery Consultant at Sanderson-iKas Singapore
    May 2026 - Present · 3 mos

    As a Lead Delivery Consultant at Sanderson-iKas, I partner with clients across APAC to deliver end-to-end talent solutions across Technology, Product, and specialist functions. My focus is on building strong, trusted relationships with hiring managers and leadership teams to deeply understand business needs and translate them into effective hiring strategies. I lead full-cycle delivery across competitive markets, managing complex mandates and senior-level searches across tech, fintech, and digital sectors. This includes market mapping, talent engagement, stakeholder management, and driving search strategies that balance speed, quality, and long-term fit. Beyond delivery, I contribute to business growth through client development, account expansion, and supporting strategic hiring initiatives. I also play a role in mentoring and supporting junior consultants, ensuring consistency in delivery standards and best practices across the team. My work is centered on being a strategic hiring partner rather than a transactional recruiter, helping clients think more deeply about talent markets, organisational design, and hiring feasibility in fast-moving environments. Core focus areas: - Tech and Product talent delivery across APAC - Senior stakeholder and client relationship management - Executive and specialist search - Market mapping and talent intelligence - Business development and account growth - Mentoring and delivery leadership

  • Principal Talent Consultant at Atomic Recruitment Singapore
    Dec 2023 - Apr 2026 · 2 yrs 5 mos

    As a Principal Talent Consultant at Atomic Group, I led end-to-end recruitment delivery across Technology, Fintech, Crypto, and Cybersecurity markets across APAC. My role combined senior-level talent advisory, full-cycle recruitment, and business development, with a strong emphasis on building long-term client partnerships in highly competitive talent markets. I managed complex, retained and contingent mandates across engineering, product, data, and commercial functions, partnering closely with founders, hiring managers, and senior leadership teams. This included driving search strategy, market mapping, candidate engagement, and offer negotiation for mid to senior-level and leadership hires. In addition to delivery, I was responsible for driving business growth through client acquisition, account development, and expanding Atomic Group’s presence across key strategic accounts. I played an active role in identifying new business opportunities, pitching recruitment solutions, and securing long-term hiring partnerships. I also contributed internally by onboarding and training new consultants, supporting them on delivery best practices, client management, and search execution, while helping to uplift overall team performance and consistency.

  • Manager, Talent Acquisition (Tech & Product) at foodpanda
    Dec 2021 - Dec 2023 · 2 yrs 1 mo

    foodpanda (small ‘f’) is the world’s favourite way to order food online from the comfort of your home or office. Whether it’s getting your hands on your favourite pasta, kebab or pizza, we believe that no one should have to suffer from hunger attacks ever again. Our parent company, Delivery Hero, is a global leader in the food delivery industry processing over 3 million orders every day and operating in 40+ markets in the world, with 18,000 employees and approximately 500,000+ restaurant partners. In APAC, foodpanda operates in over 150 cities across 12 countries. Trivial problems can always become large technical challenges at scale. If you love technology, efficiency and simplicity as much as we do, there is no better place to experience this than in foodpanda. We always genuinely care about experience, efficiency and scalability. We do not just solve technical problems but build the foundations for foodpanda’s operations with the best tools on hand. Any questions? Feel free to leave me a message! And yes, we are hiring!

  • Talent Acquisition Specialist at Grab
    Mar 2021 - Dec 2021 · 10 mos

    Hiring for roles across Product Management, Product Design, and Technical Program Management in Grab Singapore: Content Designers | Product Designers | Product Design Managers | Product Managers | Product Management Leaders | Technical Program Managers | UX Designers | UX/UI Designers | UX Writers The design team follows a simple philosophy: our design must be well thought through, our products must be useful and delight our customers all while enhancing their lives. Our humble user experience practitioners come from different parts of the world and have different backgrounds, such as engineering, content strategy, industrial design, architecture, psychiatry, printing etc. We believe diversity enables innovation. Product Managers at Grab focus on identifying our consumer and business problems and are at the intersection of business, design, and engineering. Product Managers have to be technical enough to understand how our underlying products are built and have a keen eye for design. They are master communicators that work to bring teams together to drive towards a singular goal of making a product successful. Finally, they are disciplined and understand that product management is both an art and a science If that sounds like a mission you can get behind then we would love to talk with you. Get in touch!

  • Talent Acquisition Associate- Tech Team at Shopee
    Feb 2020 - Mar 2021 · 1 yr 2 mos

    Recruiting within the Tech team here at Shopee- We are currently looking for talents within our team and for the roles stated below: Data Engineering: - Data Engineer - Data Infrastructure Engineer - Data Infrastructure - SRE - DevOps Engineer - Data Product - Frontend Engineer - Data Product - Backend Engineer (Java) - Data Product - FE Engineer Lead - Data Product - BE Engineer Lead (Java) Please drop me an email at [email protected] if you are keen for a discussion. If you happen to know anybody that may be interested in these roles, kindly connect them to me! Do head to careers.shopee.sg and find out about more roles we are hiring for! :)