Sameera Poduri in

Sameera Poduri

Energizer · DISC type I
Director of Engineering, AI at Uber
📍 San Francisco, California, United States

Sameera Poduri is the Director of Engineering, AI at Uber, leading teams in India and the US. With a PhD from USC and over 15 years of experience, she specializes in building autonomous GenAI conversational assistants and agent co-pilot systems to transform customer support.

Beyond her core role, Sameera has a foundational passion for hands-on engineering, stemming from her university days. She also contributes to the broader tech community as an instructor for online data science courses, helping to educate aspiring data scientists and engineers.

Unique fact: While at IIT Bombay, she designed and built multiple robots from scratch, including a six-legged walking robot.

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Experience
14 Years
Current Role
Director of Engineering, AI
Job Level
Mid-senior
Location
San Francisco, California, United States
Personality Overview

How Sameera shows up

Relationship Oriented
Big Picture Person
Enthusiastic

They are really good at seeing what the long-term impacts of their decisions could be. They are always positive and upbeat, so take their promises with a pinch of salt. They are friendly, approachable and love to make new connections.

Priorities

Topics Sameera cares about

Conversational AI
Leads teams at Uber developing multilingual (80+ languages) and multi-modal conversational assistants to create more efficient and empathetic customer support experiences.
Generative AI Scale
Focuses on solving challenges in deploying generative AI at Uber's scale, including autonomous reasoning, policy adherence, and customer personalization.
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Career

Work history

3-2025
Director of Engineering, AI
Uber
1-2022 - 3-2025
Senior Manager, AI
Uber
9-2018 - 1-2022
Senior Staff TLM, Uber AI
Uber
1-2017 - 8-2018
Head of Data Science
Amino
6-2015 - 10-2016
Principal Data Scientist
Jawbone
In the press

Media appearances

Artificial Intelligence – Meet the Leader: Sameera Poduri. Featured in Uber Blog
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Artificial Intelligence – Meet the Leader: Sameera Poduri. Featured in Uber Blog
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Education
Ph.D.
University of Southern California
BTech
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
M.Tech.
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
Social presence
in
Behavioral profile

DISC profile (public)

I

Influence (I)

Influence (I) reflects the degree to which a person prefers to work by influencing or persuading others. Those scoring high tend to be people oriented, motivated by social recognition and building relationships.

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