Cyanogen scales up; hires key Amazon and Qualcomm executives

Cyanogen Inc. announced it has hired Stephen Lawler as Senior Vice President of Engineering and Karthick Iyer as Vice President of Global Systems.  According to an update on the Cyanogen website, Lawler will be responsible for worldwide engineering at Cyanogen, while Iyer will head systems engineering. The update says, “A twenty-year industry veteran, Lawler joins Cyanogen from Amazon where he was most recently a Vice President. Before that, he spent 15 years at Microsoft in key senior roles including CTO of Bing Maps, GM of Software Development for Bing Maps, Bing Mobile, Local Search, MSN and Virtual Earth.” Talking about Iyer’s experience, it added, “Iyer has held ever increasing engineering responsibilities at Qualcomm Inc. for the past 18 years. Most recently, he was the Vice President of Engineering where he led a global team that designed, developed and commercialised Android solutions at the chipset level. There, he built and led a top-notch global Android organization that successfully enabled the shipments of over 1 billion Android smartphones.” Kirk McMaster, Co-founder and CEO of Cyanogen said, “Our focus continues to be evolving the Android platform and driving innovation in mobile computing.” “Signals, services and systems are at the heart of building an evolved computing platform. Both Lawler and Iyer respectively are world class leaders in these areas, each having scaled some of the most successful computing and services platforms. Lawler brings a wealth of technical leadership in mobile, mapping, location, search, and cloud services. Iyer has deep expertise in end-to-end Android development. Both understand how to optimally scale engineering organizations,” McMaster said. Cyanogen is known for the Cyanogen OS that is used on the **YU Yuphoria** , **YU Yureka** , **OnePlus One** and **Oppo N1 CyanogenMod Edition** . While Cyanogen OS is developed by Cyanogen, the community driven OS is called Cyanogenmod.