Uber has appointed Varsha Mahadevan as Director of Engineering for its GenAI Platform, strengthening its engineering leadership as the mobility company continues to build capabilities around generative artificial intelligence.
Mahadevan announced the move in a LinkedIn update, confirming that she has started her new position at Uber. In her role, she will focus on the company's GenAI platform and the engineering infrastructure required to support the development and deployment of generative AI applications. Her appointment was also reported by exchange4media.
Mahadevan joins Uber from Coinbase, where she served as Director of Engineering and Head of AI Platform. At the cryptocurrency platform, she was involved in building enterprise-grade generative AI systems for employees and customers, including the company's internal AI platform and customer-facing conversational AI capabilities.
Her work at Coinbase covered the operational requirements of deploying large language model-based applications at enterprise scale, including latency, availability, security, cost and scalability. In a 2024 technical blog co-authored by Mahadevan, Coinbase detailed its approach to developing enterprise GenAI applications and highlighted the need to balance model performance with safeguards and infrastructure reliability.
Before Coinbase, Mahadevan served as Associate Vice President of Engineering at BankBazaar. Earlier in her career, she spent several years at Microsoft, where she worked across engineering roles associated with products and technologies including Windows, Cortana and Search.
Her professional experience spans more than two decades across software engineering, machine learning and AI infrastructure. She holds a master's degree from Kansas State University and a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Vivekanand Education Society's Institute of Technology, according to publicly available professional information.
The appointment comes as Uber continues to explore generative AI across its technology ecosystem. A dedicated GenAI platform can provide common infrastructure and tools for engineering teams building AI-powered applications, while helping standardise how models and related services are deployed across an organisation.
Mahadevan's previous work also reflects the shift from individual generative AI experiments towards shared enterprise platforms. At Coinbase, the AI infrastructure she worked on supported applications across employee productivity and customer-facing use cases, with the company focusing on issues such as reliability, trust and safety when operationalising the technology.
At Uber, her appointment places her at the engineering layer of the company's GenAI efforts, with responsibility centred on the platform capabilities required to support generative AI development at scale.
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