The Google Street View leader hits the road to join Lyft's mapping team

Google has lost yet another major executive this week. Luc Vincent, who worked at Google for 12 years and was the head of its Street View team, has revealed he has left the company to join the mapping team at Lyft.

According to Recode, Vincent will become Lyft’s new vice president of engineering for its mapping and marketplace teams. He report to another of the company’s vice president of engineering, Peter Morelli.  Vincent indicated his first job will be to improve the real-time mapping features on the Lyft app and will also work to refine the company’s algorithm for its vehicle routing, as well as the math behind matching the rider with their Lyft driver. However, it’s more than possible he will be working on other projects in the future, including Lyft’s plans to launch self-driving cars.

During his tenure at Google, Vincent helped to launch the popular Street View portion of Google Maps. Many people may have seen the company’s cars with the camera on top. Those cars take the panoramic images that are collected and used to make the Street View maps. Some of those pictures have included some funny, and some odd, images over the years but there’s no doubt that Street View helped to revolutionize how we navigate while on the road. It will be interesting to see how much of Vincent’s experience at Google will be used to lead Lyft’s mapping team, especially as it tries to launch its autonomous vehicles. much like its biggest ride share rival Uber is trying to do.

Vincent has become the second major Google executive this week to reveal his departure for a smaller but growing company. On Tuesday, Nicholas Jitkoff, the leader of Google’s Material Design team, revealed he will now be the new Vice President of Design at the cloud file storage and collaboration company Dropbox.