Calendly Appoints Former Meta, PayPal Executive Jigar Desai as CTO

ATLANTA — 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 for 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.

“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. 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.”

Tope Awotona

Founder, Chief Executive Officer at Calendly

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. 

To learn more about the Calendly leadership team, click here.

Calendly helps individuals, teams, and organizations automate the meeting lifecycle by removing the back and forth with scheduling. Calendly’s cloud-based platform offers a new layer of the modern digital technology stack by connecting with critical tools to automate scheduling workflows, creates a more delightful customer experience, and provides insightful, measurable data to drive better business outcomes. Today, more than 20 million users across 230+ countries use Calendly to simplify meetings, collaborate more effectively and efficiently, and drive business forward.