Uber elevates India technology leader Vidhya Duthaluru to global role

Uber has elevated Vidhya Duthaluru, who heads a 70-member engineering team at the Bengaluru technology centre, to global engineering head for the the company’s customer care platform.

Duthaluru becomes the first Indian woman in a technology role to lead a global team at Uber. She will be responsible for the entire customer support engineering operations at Uber globally, and will have teams in Palo Alto and San Francisco offices report to her, Uber said on Monday. “I am delighted to be given this incredible opportunity to scale up the global customer obsession engineering team," Duthaluru said. 

In December, Business Standard reported that Uber was prepping India as a key engineering hub to support global ride-hailing operations. It plans to increase engineering staff here to 1,000 from 600, and divert work on many key functions to India.

Uber hired Duthaluru, a post-doctoral researcher in neural sciences, in August 2018 to build out customer support functions out of the Uber's Bengaluru centre. The many products her team has fished out, which are deployed on Uber app in all geographies, include an automated support platform, tools for customer support executives and a bunch of back-end features for UberEats, Uber's food-delivery vertical whose India unit was recently sold to Zomato.

Duthaluru has led high-impact innovations "to improve customer support experiences and feedback mechanisms for millions of users worldwide, including riders, drivers, eaters, delivery persons, and restaurants,” Uber said. She has 20 years of experience in advanced technologies. 

With a specialisation in speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP), Duthaluru has deployed similar applications for several enterprises in the past such as [24]7.ai, Nuance Communications, IBM and Nynex Science and Technology.