The new hires are part of Uber’s expanding tech teams across the globe, including in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Amsterdam and India. The company also inaugurated a new floor in its Bengaluru tech center earlier this week. It was inaugurated by C.N. Ashwath Narayan, Minister of IT, Karnataka.
According to Praveen Neppalli Naga, vice president and head of mobility engineering at Uber, the company is also looking to partner with the government of Karnataka, to leverage public data for mobility services wherever possible, and vice-versa.
“We have some partnerships with city governments etc., like certain cities in US, where the cities actually want Uber to help out. So we use (our) data to help out," he said. “Same thing in India as well. Wherever it’s (public data) available we use it, and it’s an ongoing work for us. This is why we want to partner with the Karnataka government to be able to build the tech center in one of the universities and actually partner with them very closely," he told Mint.
The company said it will be hiring engineers, data scientists and program managers to join its tech centers and product teams here in India. Manikandan Thangarathnam, senior director, engineering at Uber, said that the aim would be to build products locally and scaling them globally.
The US-based mobility firm first opened its tech center in India in 2014, at Jubilee Hills in Hyderabad, and has expanded to two such centers since. The India tech centers are now its second-largest in the world, behind those in the US. The company said that engineers in Hyderabad and Bengaluru handle “critical functions" like rider engineering, eats engineering, infra tech, data maps, Uber for business, fintech, and more.
