Uber has hired Amazon veteran Manikandan Thangarathnam as Senior Director to lead all its Rider and Platform engineering teams in Bengaluru.

The cab hailing firm also said it is hiring 85 more engineers in the country. This is in addition to 140 engineers it had announced it was hiring last month, taking the total ongoing hiring to 225 engineers.

Also read: Uber to hire 140 engineers for Bengaluru, Hyderabad teams

Thangarathnam’s addition to the team is part of Uber’s aim to strengthen its tech capabilities, as the company is positioning India as a technology hub from where it will build and innovate for the world, said a company release. He comes with over 20 years of experience in spearheading engineering efforts across global majors, including a 13-year stint at Amazon, building several core platforms and products. In his most recent role, he led engineering efforts for the Amazon Appstore and was instrumental in bootstrapping the tech major’s Chennai office and building a vast team of engineers, it added.

Speaking about the move to Uber, Thangarathnam said, “It’s an exciting opportunity to join Uber and work together to transform the mobility landscape across the globe. As the world steps into a new normal, adaptability is going to be a key aspect to usher in growth. I look forward to leading the bright minds at Uber and innovating together for the world, one ride at a time.”

Recently, Uber also hired Jayaram Valliyur as Senior Director to lead its global finance technology team, spread across multiple geographies. Prior to Uber, he, too, had worked at Amazon, for 14 years, where he was responsible for bootstrapping and scaling its India development centre. Uber’s tech expansion plans in India are in line with its vision to make mobility and delivery more accessible, and to become the backbone of transportation in thousands of cities across the globe, said the release.

The Rider mobility team works on the challenge of enabling the next billion trips by building new services including high capacity vehicles (Uber bus), and car rentals, among others. The Marketplace team is building a highly-available and scalable self-serve gateway to configure, manage, and monitor the application programming interfaces (API) of every business domain at Uber, the release said.

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