Grab’s engineering head departs

Grab’s former vice president of engineering Arul Kumaravel (L) talking at a media briefing in Singapore in January 2016. Photo credit: Grab Indonesia.

Grab’s vice president of engineering, Arul Kumaravel, has left the company. Grab confirmed his departure for personal reasons to Tech in Asia earlier today. It’s unclear where he’s headed next.

Kumaravel joined the ride-hailing company – then known as GrabTaxi – in April 2015. He arrived in Singapore from Amazon in Seattle, where he headed up engineering for the ecommerce giant’s mobile platform. Before joining Amazon in 2012, Kumaraval worked for 15 years at Microsoft, taking up various software engineering roles.

Grab co-founder and group CEO Anthony Tan said in a statement that Kumaravel “has been a great partner in his two years with company,” having played a key role in opening five new R&D centers and leading the launch of multiple services and new features.

Among the projects that Kumaravel worked on were collaborations with ride-hailing counterparts elsewhere in the world, such as Ola in India and Lyft in the US, which allowed Grab users to use these services while abroad.

“Arul has been a mentor to many of the Grab engineers, who have further developed their professional skills under him,” Tan said. “They are Grab’s future leaders and I thank Arul for his contributions in building the Grab team. We wish him all the best in his future endeavours.”

Tech in Asia reached out to Kumaravel for comment, but has not heard back.

With Kumaravel leaving, the remaining senior engineering executives at Grab include Raman Naryanan – another Microsoft alumnus – who is head of technology with the company CEO’s office, and is based at the Seattle R&D center that Kumaravel helped to launch.

A Grab spokesperson told Tech in Asia that the company is making internal appointments in the wake of Kumaravel’s departure, promoting longstanding engineers to become heads of engineering. They said that Grab is also searching externally for other senior engineering-related positions – many of which are newly created roles – and aims to hire around 800 people for its technology team worldwide during the next two years.

The exit follows that of another of Grab’s big-name tech hires, Facebook Connect creator Wei Zhu, who came onboard at around the same time as Kumaravel but left after less than a year as the company’s CTO.

Grab is currently in the midst of a funding round which is slated to raise US$2.5 billion. Didi Chuxing and SoftBank are contributing as much as US$2 billion to the round between them, and Toyota was yesterday revealed as another backer.