Amit Singhal, who’d quit Google last year after a 15 year-long stint at the company, wasn’t quite done with tech after all. He’s gone ahead and joined Uber as its SVP of Engineering.
“I’m excited to announce that I’m joining Uber as SVP of Engineering,” he wrote in a blogpost. “After 15 wonderful years at Google working on search, I wasn’t sure that I would find an opportunity as exciting or potentially world-changing. But having spent hours with Travis and many others at the company, I can confidently say Uber fits the bill.”
Catching the next ride of my professional journey with @travisk at @Uber pic.twitter.com/EGQn7VQTDJ
— Amit Singhal (@theamitsinghal) January 20, 2017
Singhal says that he’ll relish the challenge of working at Uber, “In fact as I dug deeper into how Uber works, it became pretty clear that this is one of the hardest—and therefore most fun—computer science and engineering challenges in the world today. It’s hard enough to connect millions of drivers to millions of riders in real time while creating optimal routes for drivers. Add to that the twist of predicting real-time traffic, pooling multiple riders and making the system economically attractive for everyone—and now you have one of the most challenging computer science problems I’ve encountered in my thirty-year career.”
Singhal should know a thing or two about working with hard computer science problems – at Google, he’d been instrumental in developing its search engine. Having joined Google as employee number 176, and had eventually become its Head of Search. In 2010, he was named by Fortune as one of the smartest minds in tech.
Born in Jhansi, Singhal had graduated from IIT Roorkee in 1989 and had then gone on to finish an MS in Computer Science from the University of Duluth in Minnesota. He completed his PhD from Cornell in 1996. Since his retirement from Google, he’s been working on his foundation in India. He’d also become a member of the boards of Paytm and GOQii.