Uber Chief Technology Officer Thuan Pham is resigning after seven years as an executive at the company. Uber Technologies has been hit hard by the COVID-19’s impact on the travel industry, as global transportation has ground to a virtual standstill.
The company may also be considering job cuts of as much as 20 per cent, according to tech news site the Information, which also reported on Pham’s departure earlier on Tuesday. Uber had around 27,000 employees at the end of the previous year.
An Uber spokesman denied commenting on the possible job cuts. “As you would expect, the company is looking at every possible scenario to ensure we get to the other side of this crisis in a stronger position than ever,” he said.
Members of Uber’s engineering team will be doing Pham’s duties until the company finds a permanent CTO, the spokesman said. A search effort is presently underway.
Pham, born in Vietnam, left the country as a refugee in 1979 and immigrated to the United States. He earned a Masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked at various tech companies, including as an executive at software maker VMware, before joining Uber as its CTO in 2013.
Pham informed the company on 24th April that he was resigning effective 16th May, according to filings. In a statement, Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi said he was ‘grateful’ for Pham’s tenure. “As the leader of our engineering organization for the last seven years, Thuan has made important contributions that have helped make Uber into the global technology platform it is today,” Khosrowshahi said.
In the statement, Pham said that Uber’s engineering team was working at ‘peak productivity’, and added, “We have built robust system scale and stability, and are well prepared to face the future.”