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Lyft appoints Senthil Padmanabhan as CTO
Padmanabhan will lead Lyft's engineering strategy, strengthen its AI-driven technology platform, and drive innovation to enhance rider and driver experiences.
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Bhavana P - Wed, 08, Jul 2026
- 12:13 EDT
- 30
Senthil Padmanabhan / Lyft
San Francisco-based ride-hailing company Lyft has appointed Indian-origin tech executive Senthil Padmanabhan as its new chief technology officer, effective July 20.
Padmanabhan will report directly to Lyft chief executive officer David Risher and will lead the engineering foundations that support the company's products and technology strategy as it expands its use of artificial intelligence.
The company said Padmanabhan will lead Lyft's engineering foundations, overseeing the technical infrastructure that supports product development, enhances platform reliability and performance, and advances AI-driven innovation for riders and drivers.
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“Senthil will set that direction: building on a world-class technical foundation to unlock what the company is able to deliver – helping riders get where they need to go, supporting the drivers who make that possible, and connecting people to the places and communities that matter to them,” the company said in a statement.
Before joining Lyft, Padmanabhan served as vice president of engineering at eBay, where he was previously recognized as a Technical Fellow. During his tenure, he led the company's core engineering platform, applications and infrastructure, helping scale its technology operations and accelerate product development. He also spearheaded a companywide AI transformation that increased engineering productivity, shortened deployment cycles and enabled significantly more software deployments and product experiments.
Earlier in his career, Padmanabhan worked as a senior associate at Cognizant and later joined Yahoo! as a software engineer on the Yahoo! Mail team. There, he focused on web performance and developed a priority-based content prefetching algorithm designed to improve page load speeds and enhance the user experience.
Commenting on his new role, Padmanabhan said, “Lyft has a clear purpose, a product millions of people love and rely on every day, and a team that genuinely cares about getting it right. My job is to make sure the Lyft ceiling keeps rising – using technology to multiply what we can achieve and unlock what wasn't possible before."
Padmanabhan holds a master of science in software engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, and a bachelor of engineering in electronics and communication engineering from PSG College of Technology, Tamil Nadu.
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