Expedia Group – the company behind Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Hotwire.com, trivago and CarRentals.com – is transforming and evolving its strategy to become a technology platform. With its 70+ trillion data points that informs 600 billion AI predictions, it powers 200 travel sites, 3 million properties and 500 airlines.
To spearhead the next stage of transformation, Expedia Group is building a highly skilled technology leadership team who bring specific capabilities and deep expertise that will help realize its mission to power global travel for everyone, everywhere. These exceptional talents come from the most well-known technology giants and big brands on the planet, and have joined Expedia Group to help transform its platform as it enters the next phase of its evolution.
“Our new hires are a clear signal that we’re entering the next phase of our transformation to a platform business,” said Rathi Murthy, Chief Technology Officer at Expedia Group. “To help shape this journey, we’ve attracted highly skilled and widely respected leaders, who will strengthen Expedia Group’s leadership in technology. I look forward to the skills and experience they will add to our organization.”
The new technology leaders are:
Sachin Singh, Senior Vice President, Search and Supply – Sachin joins Expedia Group from Amazon where he spent over 13 years in various leadership roles. Sachin has a strong track record delivering solutions that combine Technology, Machine Learning, Product Management, and Business Operations to improve the experience for millions of shoppers and sellers across dozens of countries and languages. He also has proven expertise in leading and driving positive step function changes through large global multi-disciplinary organizations. He most recently led the development of technology solutions to proactively ensure customer safety and regulatory compliance across all product lines, globally, for Amazon. Prior to that, he led the Product Discovery team that improved Amazon’s overall product search experience by leveraging product knowledge graph. He also led Amazon’s Catalog Quality team who built tech solutions that enriched information content for billions of products within Amazon’s product catalog, to enable best-in-class shopping experience.
Reena Patil, Senior Vice President, Partner Product – Reena is a customer-focused product and engineering leader with expertise in digital transformation, cybersecurity, building scalable platforms and monetization of consumer products. Her focus is defining product strategy, increasing operational effectiveness, top line growth and driving value through partnerships. Reena joins us from Google, where she led product management for several groups during her 11 year tenure including: building and launching G Suite Enterprise to meet cybersecurity and compliance needs for large companies. Being part of the original Google Wallet team and working on Google’s payments platform and partnerships. Most recently she worked on Local and Maps monetization to help reach local customers and drive in-store sales in the post-pandemic recovery. She has also held leadership roles at Motorola and started her career as a software engineer on the Windows team at Microsoft. Reena is an advocate for children in foster care and contributes to several women-in-tech and diversity initiatives like Girls Who Code, Technovation and gMentors.
Archana Arunkumar, Senior Vice President, Platform as a Product – Archana is a visionary global technology and product strategy executive with more than 20 years of experience. She joins Expedia Group from Workday where she was Vice President of Technology Products. She has a proven track record of scaling platforms for high growth, strengthening the platform foundation of SaaS organizations and developing new market opportunities. Previously, she was director and head of Platform Product at Dropbox, where she was responsible for setting strategic vision and improving the developer experience for the Dropbox Platform. She is a prominent thought leader for driving platform strategy and leading data strategies in compliance-heavy industries. Archana has also served as an executive sponsor for the many diversity, equity, and inclusion programs throughout her tenure at various organizations.
Rajesh Naidu, Chief Architect – Rajesh has extensive experience delivering scalable, resilient, and flexible state-of-the art digital platforms for a variety of industries including tech, retail, and food & beverage. He joins Expedia Group from Starbucks where he has led the Enterprise Architecture space for nine years, the last three as VP Enterprise Data & Analytics Technology, Enterprise Architecture & Emerging Technology. In this role, Rajesh led global teams of architects, product management and engineering resources to deliver industry leading digital, analytics and omnichannel platforms and solutions that power 10,000+ stores and touch 24M+ loyalty customers. He also held principal architect and consulting roles at both SAP and HP. Rajesh currently serves as Founding Board Member for the University of Washington Information School.
Doug Powell, Vice President, Design Practice Management – Doug Powell is an award-winning designer with more than 30 years of experience in a wide range of design disciplines. Previously Doug was Vice President of Design, responsible for design leadership and practices for the global community of designers at IBM. He is a recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Alumni Award from the Sam Fox School of Design at Washington University in St. Louis, and the 2014 Fellow Award from AIGA Minnesota, Doug is a lecturer, commentator and thought leader on design issues. He has presented at a variety of global conferences, forums, and universities including Beirut Design Week in Lebanon, Fortune’s Brainstorm Design in Singapore, and Yale School of Management. He was on the jury of the 2018 Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards. Between 2011-2013 Doug served as the national president of AIGA, the professional association for design, the largest and most established design organization in the world.
Arun Dutta, Vice President, India Managing Director – Arun is an astute technologist who has led large technology centers for global companies – seeing success not only in software development and platform transformation and operations, but in being a site leader that has helped grow teams in India, building culture and belonging, and fostering innovation. He joins Expedia Group from Victoria’s Secret, where he led the largest global technology organization through a technology transformation that enabled market leadership, improved time to market, created efficiencies, and leapfrogged technology-driven innovation to offer improved customer experience. This follows similar leadership success at GSN Games (a Sony Pictures company), Cornerstone On Demand, Danaher, and HP.
As an established technology company with huge amounts of data and capabilities in travel, and exceptional leaders, Expedia Group is on track to being the best travel platform in the industry.
