Amit Singhal
Amit Singhal, former employee of Google resigns from Uber after allegations of sexual harassment at his previous company comes to light.Reuters

Amitabh Kumar Singhal has stepped down from his position as senior vice-president of Uber, after it emerged that he had not disclosed to the ride-hailing company that he had to leave Google following allegations of sexually harassing an employee.

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Singhal joined Uber just a month ago, on January 20, and was asked to resign by Uber CEO Travis Kalanick on Monday, February 27.

Singhal worked with Google for a decade-and-a-half before leaving in February last year. He announced his exit from the search engine giant on February 3, 2016.

He said, "My life has been a dream journey. From a little boy growing up in the Himalayas dreaming of the Star Trek computer, to an immigrant who came to the United States with two suitcases and not much else, to the person responsible for Search at Google, every turn has enriched me and made me a better person."

Uber had no idea about the allegations he faced at Google until Recode informed them of the chain of events on Monday.

While internal investigations done by Google had proved the allegations 'credible', sources at Uber said that the company had done extensive background checks of Singhal, but had discovered no hint of the circumstances of his departure from Google.

Singhal who denied the allegations at the time, still continues to do so.

This incident came to light within just span of few days when Susan Fowler, a 25-year old site reliability engineer wrote a detailed blog of incidents of sexual harassments by one of her managers.

Here are 5 things you need to know about Singhal:

  1. Singhal was born in Jhansi, in Uttar Pradesh, India
  2. He received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in computer science from IIT Roorkee in 1989. He received an MS degree from University of Minnesota Duluth in 1991. He also received a PhD in 1996 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
  3. While at Cornell, Singhal studied with Gerard Salton, who is referred to in the book The Search, as 'the father of digital search'.
  4. Singhal joined Google in 2000 where he ran Google's core search quality department, responsible for the Google search algorithms.
  5. In 2017, he joined Uber as SVP of Engineering.
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