Google’s Former Head of Search Amit Singhal Joins Uber to Lead Its Global Mapping Division

Amit Singhal will report directly to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, and will work alongside Anthony Levandowski, vice president of engineering and head of Uber’s self-driving car division (and Co-Founder at Otto).

He will head up the ride-hailing startup’s Maps and Marketplace division, and will work to scale up Uber’s self-driving engineering unit.

Singhal becomes the latest ex-Google wiz to migrate to the fast-growing ride-hailing company.

He joins Manik Gupta, the former head of Google Maps product division, and Brian McClendon, who once ran Google’s entire mapping division.

It comes at the same time that Uber is pumping $500 million into building a map of the entire world, a crucial step toward using autonomous vehicles.

Read: Meet the power players who really run Uber

On his personal blog, Singhal said he was looking forward to tackling the challenge of helping Uber build maps for autonomous vehicles.

“It’s hard enough to connect millions of drivers to millions of riders in real time while creating optimal routes for drivers,” he said.

“Add to that the twist of predicting real-time traffic, pooling multiple riders and making the system economically attractive for everyone - and now you have one of the most challenging computer science problems I’ve encountered in my thirty-year career.”

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