Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi has hired another former Google employee to help the company with its big ambitions. This time around, according to The Wall Street Journal, it has picked up Jai Mani, who will serve as lead product manager in India. The ex-Googler reportedly worked as a strategy and analytics associate for Google Play.

This comes little more than a year after Xiaomi brought on Hugo Barra, Google's former Vice President of Android Product Management, to serve as its VP of Global Operations. He told the Wall Street Journal to think of this hiring as "the beginning of our R&D center development in India."

“The first person we hired is someone who’s going to be the glue between our users in India, product feedback that we receive, and the engineering team we have in Beijing as well as the engineering team that we are going to be building fairly soon in India."

- Hugo Barra, Xiaomi VP of Global Operations

Barra says he worked very closely with Mani during his time at Google. The latter left the search giant in 2013. Here's a picture of Mani demoing a product on-stage that Barra shared on Google+.

Xiaomi is a powerhouse in China, but its influence is limited in other parts of the world. The company wants to establish a strong foothold in India, the world's second largest telecommunications market. With no US presence, we don't have all that much to say about the company's products, but we'll continue to keep an eye on them as they make inroads in other parts of the world.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, +HugoBarra