Vidhya Duthaluru to head Uber’s global engineering team

Bengaluru, March 3 (IANS) Ride-hailing major Uber on Tuesday named Bengaluru-based Vidhya Duthaluru as the global engineering head for the customer care platform.

Duthaluru will lead teams in Uber’s Bay Area and Bengaluru tech centres to improve customer support experiences and feedback mechanisms for millions of users worldwide, including riders, drivers, eaters, delivery persons, and restaurants.

Duthaluru joined Uber’s Bengaluru tech centre in August 2018 with a mandate to set up a team to build the customer care platform technology known as the “Customer Obsession” team within Uber.

“I look forward to working with this talented team across our global tech centers in Bengaluru and Bay Area as we continue to make a significant impact on customer experience through new technologies and data,” Duthaluru said on her new role.

From being a first employee and a leader of this team, Duthaluru in less than two years, successfully scaled up the team at Uber Bengaluru to more than 70 employees today.

Under Duthaluru’s leadership, the team here has been at the forefront of high-impact innovations, Uber said.

She is now in charge of the entire Customer Obsession engineering team, including the teams at Uber’s San Francisco and Palo Alto tech centres.

This team has delivered several in-app support features through automation and developed tools for Uber’s customer support executives.

With Machine Learning models that learn from trip signals and user behaviours, the team builds technology that predicts and resolves issues.

Born and raised in Mumbai, Duthaluru did her engineering from University of Mumbai and later completed her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer engineering from Rutgers University, US.

She is one of the few technologists who have worked in speech recognition and natural language understanding from the very early days of the emergence of these technologies and has been at the forefront of their commercialisation.

Uber Bengaluru and Hyderabad tech Centres are global centres that work towards improving the Uber experience for the Uber community, including riders, drivers, eaters, delivery persons, and restaurants globally.