Srikanth Thirumalai

2024 Distinguished Alumni Award

For transformational leadership and significant contributions to technical innovation across multiple industries. 

Srikanth Thirumalai is Vice President of Engineering at Waymo, a leader in autonomous driving technology, whose mission is to be the world’s most trusted driver. Waymo’s objective is to make it safer, more accessible, and more sustainable for people to get around, without the need for anyone in the driver’s seat. At Waymo, Srikanth leads the Onboard Software organization, which is responsible for the software stack that powers the Waymo Driver. Teams within the Onboard organization develop state-of-the-art robotics foundation models (generative machine learning models) that power perception, agent prediction, and motion planning tasks. As of August 2024, Waymo provides more than a hundred thousand paid rides every week across San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. 

Prior to Waymo, Srikanth held various senior leadership positions at Amazon, including Vice President of Search, Alexa Shopping, and Personalization. In all those roles, he led transformative efforts that replaced classical machine learning algorithms with deep learning models that resulted in significant, discontinuous improvements in relevance and revenue. From specialized autoencoder models that recommended products to customers in the mid-2010s, to large language models that answer questions and help customers make no-regret shopping decisions these days, Srikanth and his teams built products that Amazon customers around the world love and use every day. 

Throughout his career, Srikanth and his teams have developed products and technologies that have paved the way for the creation of new businesses and the upheaval of existing ones. In the late 1990s, at Akamai Technologies, a leader in Content Delivery Networks, Srikanth worked on state-of-the-art, planet-scale, load balancing, routing algorithms that ushered in the era of streaming video, something we all take for granted today. At Amazon, he applied machine learning to scale product search and discovery to customers all over the world, accelerating the global shift from physical retail to online shopping. At Waymo, Srikanth is leading efforts to do something similar by advancing the state of the art in generative AI to radically transform how humans get around in their daily lives.

Srikanth received a B.Tech. degree in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur, an M.S. degree for his work in Computer Vision from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Ph.D. degree from the same department for his work in Numerical Linear Algebra for Signals and Systems. Srikanth and his wife live in Los Altos, California, where he spends his leisure time enjoying the outdoors, reading, and learning Spanish.

Current as of 2024.