Women’s day special: Vidya Duthaluru, Global Head for Customer Obsession Team, Uber
A strong believer in gender balance, Duthaluru feels that a diverse group always makes a great team. Diversity brings different perspectives; different perspectives means more ideas and better results
Vidhya Duthaluru who has recently been appointed as the global engineering head for the Customer Care platform at Uber believes that the foundation of women’s leadership in Tech is in choosing Tech as a career.
Inspired by women like Rosa Parks, Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi who are confident, self-assured and epitomes of unwavering courage and conviction, Duthaluru is riding high on her career track.
Duthaluru joined Uber’s Bengaluru tech center in August 2018 with a mandate to set up a team to build a best-in-class customer care platform. From being the first employee of this team and a leader, now the team is a robust 70 plus employees in less than two years.
She and her team are responsible for creating seamless customer engagement experiences through the support platform for Uber’s customers and community globally. The team of proficient engineers has been at the forefront of high-impact innovations. The team has delivered several in-app support experiences through automation and developed tools for Uber’s customer support executives.
Duthaluru, reflecting on her career milestones, says “if there is one thing I have done right is to stay true to my passion for technology and engineering. That is what I encourage the young girls to do. Stay true to your passion and follow it through. That will make you good at what you do, have a career you love, and get you the success you deserve.”
Uber Cool attitude:
Vidhya who holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rutgers University has over 20 years of experience in advanced technologies. With a specialization in Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing, Vidhya has deployed similar applications for several enterprises in the past such as [24]7.ai, Nuance Communications, IBM and Nynex Science and Technology.
A strong believer in gender balance, Duthaluru feels that a diverse group always makes a great team. Diversity brings different perspectives; different perspectives means more ideas and better results. “Most importantly, we need to be inclusive with our diverse perspectives. Hence, a cultural and mindset shift towards inclusivity is something I would like to focus more on,” she claims.
As tech looms large on Duthaluru life, “I encourage more and more girls to choose engineering as a career choice and follow it through. Take up challenging roles and grow with them. In my opinion, women second-guess themselves a lot when it comes to taking up challenging job roles at work. My part is to encourage, mentor, and reassure the best-in-class women in Tech when they are ready to take that next step towards leadership and to guide them along their journey.
A hardcore techie, Duthaluru is excited about the impact one can make with machine learning and AI. “Across almost any industry, we know a lot more about our consumers’ usage patterns today than we used to just a few years ago. With advanced deep learning techniques and AI headed towards democratization, we can now start leveraging these technologies to make things easier and more efficient. AI and ML are at the core of tech at Uber and extremely important in our journey to connect the physical world to the digital world in real-time. I am interested in seeing how we can use these technologies to make better decisions, provide personalized experiences to our customers, and solve problems for cities at large,” she points out.
Duthaluru is also actively involved with the She++ program and U4Her program at Uber, designed for women who had taken a career break and are considering taking up suitable opportunities wanting to set their career in motion. She also engages with early-in-career women in Tech to encourage and mentor them for a career in Tech.
Duthaluru say that she has learned so much from so many people in her life that it is difficult to identify one person she admires. “I was surrounded by strong women in my life while growing up, such as my grandmother. She learned English in her fifties because she always wanted to and became fluent. I have learned the power of determination and resilience from all the role models in my family,” she adds.
Pondering over her new role, she says, “I am excited to be given an enormous opportunity to be able to make a significant impact on our customer experience through advanced technologies and data-driven insights.” She adds, “More recently, that I have taken on a broader scope, and now lead the customer care technology team globally. I am excited about the transformational roadmap that we have embarked on in the Bay area and Bengaluru tech centers.”
