Uber has gained two former Google executives to work on the startup’s engineering team, the ride-hailing company has confirmed.
Uber has hired two significant Google veterans
Google’s former head of search, Amit Singhal, and the company’s SVP of engineering, Kevin Thompson, will be working together at the ride-sharing behemoth.
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Former Google head of search Amit Singhal is joining Uber as SVP of engineering and former VP of engineering at Google Kevin Thompson will report to Singhal at Uber as VP of marketplace engineering.
Singhal will work alongside CTO Thuan Pham and both will report directly to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. In his new role, Thompson will be managing things like driver dispatch and ride pricing.
Singhal, the head engineer for the single most important product at Google, search, had been with the company for 15 years when he retired in February 2016. Thompson, who had been with Google for 12 years, officially resigned in November.
At the time Thompson resigned, he had been working on the engineering team of YouTube ads.
Another executive working in ads, former Google Americas president Margo Georgiadis, has also recently moved on from the company. Georgiadis started working at Google in 2009 and was often the top-ranking ad exec at events like YouTube’s Brandcast, where Google tried to persuade big-brand advertisers to move dollars from TV to YouTube.
Update: Story was updated to reflect that Kevin Thompson was a VP of engineering at Google, not an SVP of engineering as previously stated.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
