Uber’s SVP of engineering, Amit Singhal, left the company earlier today after Uber CEO Travis Kalanick asked him to step down, Recode reports. According to Recode, Singhal failed to disclose a sexual harassment allegation made against him at former employer Google during the hiring process.
This comes after Uber’s hell of a week filled with a sexual harassment allegation from former employee Susan Fowler, another #DeleteUber campaign, investors speaking out against Uber and a lawsuit from Google over technology used in its self-driving cars.
Singhal was a senior vice president of search before he resigned in Feb. 2016. At the time, Singhal framed his resignation as a retirement, but the retirement lasted less than a year — Singhal joined Uber this January.
Although Uber conducts background checks on new hires, Uber learned of the complaint against Singhal from a Recode reporter. CEO Travis Kalanick asked Singhal to resign this morning.
Google planned to fire Singhal after determining that the sexual harassment complaint against him was credible, Recode reports. But Singhal chose to resign instead, and Google allowed him to leave quietly because the woman who filed the complaint did not want to go public.
Singhal worked at Google for 15 years before he stepped down and was a key executive on the company’s search team.
“As I entered the fifteenth year of working at Google, I’ve been asking myself the question, ‘what would you want to do for the next fifteen?’ The answer has overwhelmingly been: give back to others. It has always been a priority for me to give back to people who are less fortunate, and make time for my family amidst competing work constraints — but on both fronts, I simply want to give and do more,” Singhal wrote in a letter announcing his departure from Google.
Google declined to comment about the nature of Singhal’s departure from the company.
Update 2:05pm PT: In an email to Bloomberg, Singhal wrote, “harassment is unacceptable in any setting” and that he wants “everyone to know that I do not condone and have not committed such behavior. In my 20-year career, I’ve never been accused of anything like this before, and the decision to leave Google was my own.”
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