DoorDash Hires Uber Eats Exec As New VP of Engineering

DoorDash announced that it has hired another Uber executive to join its team. This time, the new hire is Ryan Sokol, who is now the company’s vice president of engineering.

The news comes after DoorDash hired Prabir Adarkar, Uber’s former head of strategic finance, as its chief financial officer, according to TechCrunch.

Sokol led and scaled Uber Eats from its inception, supervising a team of more than 200 engineers, and serving on the Uber Eats executive leadership team. Previously, he was head of engineering at Voxer and has also worked for Genentech, IBM and smaller technology consultancies including his own.

At DoorDash, Sokol will lead the product, infrastructure and data science teams within the company’s engineering department, reporting to Co-Founder and CEO Tony Xu.

“Ryan comes to DoorDash at a critical inflection point in our business following a breakout year,” the company wrote in a blog post. “In 2018 we 5xed our geographic footprint from 600 to 3,300 cities and tripled our valuation to more than $4 billion. We doubled the engineering team to 200+ last year, working on a variety of problems from machine learning applications to logistics to personalizing consumer experiences. This year, we plan to double our team again and continue on our trajectory as the fastest growing last-mile logistics company in the space.”

“I’m joining DoorDash to help an amazing team reach new heights. All of my interactions and diligence with those I trust would lead me to believe that DoorDash is poised to be one of the most influential companies on the planet,” said Sokol. “I’m most looking forward to learning from some of the best and applying my accumulated knowledge to help DoorDash fast forward its tech to the future and realize its full potential as soon as possible.”

Earlier this month, it was revealed that General Motors’ self-driving car, Cruise, and DoorDash were partnering to offer unmanned food and grocery delivery, with the program scheduled to begin testing in early 2019 in the San Francisco area.

DoorDash has raised almost $1 billion in venture capital funding, most recently at a $4 billion valuation.