GrabTaxi Holdings Pte. Ltd. plans to dip into Seattle’s talent pool with the announcement that it will be opening its first U.S. office in the city.

Raman Narayanan, who is a former Microsoft Corp. “Distinguished Engineer”, joins the GrabTaxi team as a Technical Advisor. Narayanan, who is a 23-year veteran of Microsoft, will be responsible for the recruitment of individuals for the dedicated U.S. engineering team.

GrabTaxi has existing R&D centers in Singapore and Beijing. The new engineering team in Seattle will work closely with the engineering team in Singapore, led by Arul Kumaravel, VP of Engineering who is the former Head of Engineering for Amazon’s mobile platform.

The company said in its press release that it had already started adding talent to its Seattle center, including engineers from leading technology companies. The company plans to build the Seattle team further over the next year with Narayanan telling GeekWire that it expects to “bring on 12 or so employees in the next six months”.

The ride-hailing platform currently has 1.5 million daily bookings across six countries, including Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand. The Singapore-based company also has a global partnership with three other ride-hailing companies, which includes China’s Didi Kuaidi (Xiaoju Kuaizhi, Inc.), Lyft, Inc., and India’s Ola (ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd.).

Regardless of these facts, the announcement of a GrabTaxi’s U.S.-based center is not an indication that it plans to expand outside of Southeast Asia. “We see plenty of opportunity in Southeast Asia and are focused on services in our local markets where we have familiarity with local needs,” Kumaravel told The Verge.

While General Motors Inc. and Lyft recently announced a partnership to develop an on-demand network of self-driving cars, this will not be a focus point for GrabTaxi. Kumaravel told The Verge, “In Southeast Asia where GrabTaxi operates, many cities are still developing infrastructure such as detailed mapping data, which is necessary for self-driving vehicles to operate effectively. So I would say that [Sel-Driving Vehicles] SDVs are currently more relevant to the developed markets.”

The GrabTaxi Seattle team will have an office space of 3,000 square feet at the Two Union Square downtown building.

Image credit: Jon Russell; Flickr