Amazon’s Manikandan Thangarathnam takes charge as Uber’s Senior Director. In his new role, Manikandan would be leading all its Riders and Platform engineering teams all over Bengaluru.

Uber has also announced its plan to hire over 85 engineers in the country. This number would be an add-on to the 140 engineers hiring that has been announced last month. Thus, the new hiring declaration would take the total onboarding of engineers to 225.

Commenting on this new role, Manikandan says, “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 are 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.”

By onboarding Manikandan, the company is anticipating to reinforce its tech competencies. Also, the company has stated that it is positioning India as a technology hub and thus it would build and innovate for the world from here. Manikandan brings in a rich experience of 20 years in spearheading engineering efforts across the global firms. His experience also includes 13 years of a stint at Amazon, building several core platforms and products. Lately, he has led engineering efforts for the Amazon Appstore and was instrumental in bootstrapping the tech major’s Chennai office and in building a huge engineers team.

In recent times, Uber has even hired Jayaram Valliyur as Senior Director to lead its global finance technology team that is spread across multiple geographies. Before joining Uber, Jayaram was also associated with Amazon for 14 years. He supervised bootstrapping and scaling in the India development center. Uber’s tech expansion plans in India are on par with its vision to make mobility and delivery more accessible. Further, it is also determined to become the backbone of transportation across thousands of cities worldwide.

Furthermore, the rider's mobility team is working on the challenges of making high capacity vehicles (Uber bus), car rentals, and more possible. Also, the Marketplace team is focusing on building a highly-available and scalable self-serve gateway to configure, control, and supervise the API (application programming interfaces) of every business domain at Uber.