About

Theo Vassilakis is a highly experienced engineer, entrepreneur, and executive with over 25 years of relevant experience. He is passionate about applying data, math, and distributed systems to solve complex problems. Currently, he holds the position of Group CTO and Head of Engineering at Grab, Southeast Asia's leading online-to-offline mobile tech company. In this role, he has helped lead the engineering, data science, trust & safety, and infosec organizations. As a member of the executive committee, he has been instrumental in setting and reviewing the group's OKRs, strategy, M&A, policies, and budgets. Theo has made significant contributions to Grab's success, including the launch and expansion of their everyday super app, food offerings, grab ads, multiple fintech offerings, and ML/AI/geo initiatives to optimize execution. He is also a senior software engineer, research scientist, AI, ML, data scientist, mobile, and infra expert. Before joining Grab, Theo worked at Facebook as a Distributed Systems Engineer at Oculus Research. He was responsible for cloud infrastructure and distributed systems for augmented reality and worked with the Surreal team on data collection, SLAM, 3D reconstruction, and related challenges in machine perception. He has also served as an advisor to various companies on starting up, tech, go-to-market, organization, leadership, and related areas, especially for enterprise software, data, analytics, ride-hailing, fintech, AI, marketplaces, and delivery businesses like food or logistics. Theo earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Brown University and his B.Sc. in Mathematics from Stanford University. He also holds a Baccalauréat in Mathematics and Science focus from Lycée Franco-Hellénique d'Athènes (now Eugène-Delacroix). He has a strong tech stack and is highly skilled in relevant areas such as senior software engineering, research science, AI, ML, data science, mobile, and infra.