Indonesia-based ride-hailing giant Gojek has announced the appointment of a Severan Rault who previously held leadership positions in Amazon and Microsoft as its chief technology officer (CTO).
Severan Rault will take over the role of CTO from Ajey Gore.
In a statement, Gojek revealed that Rault will oversee the company’s engineering teams in Southeast Asia and India and report to co-chief executive officer Kevin Aluwi.
With regard to his appointment as the CTO of Gojek, Rault said in a statement, “It is a time like no other to be at Gojek. The company is entering a critical phase as it moves from startup to maturation and it’s special to be a part of that. Building systems and processes for a business of Gojek’s scale and complexity is a challenge one rarely enjoys in their career and I’m grateful for the opportunity.”
Previously, Rault worked at Betawave, a virtual reality studio he founded in 2016. At Amazon, Rault was one of the founders of Prime Air, the company’s drone delivery programme. At Microsoft, he was the principal architect of Bing, the company’s search engine.
Gojek is letting go around 9 percent of its workforce as the company weathers the coronavirus pandemic, which has hit its business hard, the media reported.
Around 430 Gojek employees are set to lose their job, most of them in Indonesia.
Reportedly, Gojek’s GoLife and GoFood festival divisions will the ones severely impacted.
In a statement, Gojek said, “The measures will provide the company with resources to focus on the business areas where it has the most impact… but also the services that have shown promise as a result of the pandemic, such as logistics, which has grown by 80 percent, or groceries, which has more than doubled.”