Grab Appoints New Chief Technology Officer
Jakarta. Grab, an online ride-hailing service and mobile payment platform in Southeast Asia, appointed Theo Vassilakis as the company's chief technology officer, according to a statement released on Friday (27/10).
The addition is the latest announcement in the expansion of Grab’s global research and development functions.
"With our platform generating 10 terabytes of data per day and doubling that number every quarter, we’re pleased to bring on board Theo’s deep expertise in scaling machine learning and engineering systems," said Anthony Tan, Grab's co-founder and group chief executive.
He added that Theo will oversee Grab’s transport and payments platforms, lead service growth and support further development of the company’s machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science and infrastructure scaling capabilities.
"Southeast Asia is a potential region. There’s an opportunity to make the lives of millions of people easier by developing products and services that bring convenience and income opportunities. I look forward to working on driving further the scalability, reliability and machine-learning capability of the platform," Theo said.
Theo previously served as a partner, architect and development manager for Azure at Microsoft and as an engineering director at Google. He was also the founder of Metanautix, an analytic product company that was later acquired by Microsoft.
Theo holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and a Ph.D from Brown University, both in mathematics.
In 2017, Grab has doubled the number of its research and development centers from three to six in Bangalore, India, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Jakarta.
Grab has also launched a range of new services, including GrabNow, a platform that digitizes street-hailing and GrabShuttle, a shuttle bus service.
Grab said the company is "on track" to hire at least 1,000 research and development professionals at its six centers by the end of 2018.
The Jakarta Globe and Grab are both affiliated with the Lippo Group.