Uber Poaches Key Apple Maps Senior Engineering Manager

Uber has hired away a key Apple engineer, who had been managing the Maps Apps and the Frameworks team but has now taken up a position at Uber, reports The Information. Chris Blumenberg’s departure adds up to the list of people part of the Maps team.

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Sources familiar with the matter confirmed to Jessica Lessin of the Information that Blumenberg has left Apple. His LinkedIn profile, however, still lists Apple as his current employer.

Blumenberg started at Apple back in 2000, helping the company to port Internet Explorer and Office to the Mac OS X. Shortly afterwards, he joined the Safari team as one of the first software engineers to work on Apple’s Web browser project.

He built Maps for iOS in just a handful of weeks in November 2006 so Steve Jobs could demo it during the iPhone announcement in January 2007, and during the past six years he has been responsible for the Maps Apps and Frameworks team, according to his LinkedIn profile. He managed a team of more than 40 engineers and managers responsible for everything related to the Maps client software on both iOS and Mac OS X.

Issues with the Maps team have made headlines lately, as it has slowed down Apple’s work on the features planned for the forthcoming update.

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