Grab picks Amazon and NASA veteran as its first dedicated CTO for transport

Mark Porter, Grab’s new CTO for transport / Photo credit: Grab

Grab has been shouting from the rooftops about how it is now an “everyday super-app” that does more than just ride-hailing. But it isn’t forgetting about the product that made it into what it is today.

The company has just hired Mark Porter, a former executive at Amazon, NASA, and Oracle as its new chief technology officer (CTO) of transport.

In this newly created role, Porter will take charge of the tech teams and infrastructure behind Grab’s transportation-related offerings, including private car and taxi ride-hailing, motorbike taxis, carpooling, bike-sharing, and on-demand shuttle buses.

Based in Grab’s US research and development center in Seattle, he’ll also “oversee the development of agile platforms, machine learning, AI, and data science capabilities to deliver a safer, more seamless, and personalized transport experience,” the company said in a statement.

Porter most recently served as general manager of Amazon Relational Database Services and several other Amazon Web Services projects at the US e-tailer’s Seattle headquarters. Prior to that, he was CTO at education tech firm Amplify in North Carolina, and had stints in programming at Oracle, Caltech, and NASA in the 1990s and early 2000s.

At Grab, he’ll work alongside group CTO Theo Vassilakis, who was hired late last year. The appointment of Vassilakis and the creation of Porter’s CTO for transport role mark an evolution in Grab’s tech function, following the departure of vice president of engineering Arul Kumaravel in September 2017. Grab also didn’t have a CTO after Wei Zhu, whom the ride-hailer plucked from Facebook, quit barely 12 months into the role in 2015.