Sanjay Chandra, Lucid Motors‘ most senior information technology executive, confirmed on Friday that he has left the company — seventeen days after EV first reported the departure and without any announcement from Lucid.
Writing on LinkedIn, Chandra said his time at the company had come to a close after more than five years.
Recent senior executive departures include chief operating officer Marc Winterhoff in June, chief engineer Eric Bach in November, strategy chief Claudia Gast in February and Engineering and Software Chief Emad Dlala in June.
Jean-Philippe Gauthier, Lucid‘s VP of Digital, left for Amazon’s Zoox in July after nearly thirteen years.
“More Very Soon”
Chandra described the job as a rare vantage point, spanning infrastructure, data, cybersecurity and enterprise systems across design, engineering, manufacturing, sales and service.
“The real value was never in any one of these systems — it lived in the connections across them,” he wrote. “It’s some of the hardest work in enterprise IT, always ongoing, and the accomplishments the team made on it is what I’m proudest of.”
He said none of it had been a solo act, that the people who built it alongside him were world-class, and that he was leaving with gratitude and lifelong friends.
Chandra’s profile still lists the role as current and still gives his tenure as five years and six months.
The Job He Held
Chandra’s own description of the role runs wider than the title suggests: go-to-market technologies, general and administrative enterprise systems, factory systems covering supply chain, manufacturing and logistics, global infrastructure, enterprise operations and cybersecurity.
He joined in March 2021 from TiVo, where he had spent eight years and nine months as chief information officer and head of cloud operations with responsibility for customer success, cloud operations, infrastructure, e-commerce and corporate IT.
Before that he was Director of IT and enterprise applications at Workday, senior manager of site operations at PayPal, and IT operations manager at Virgin Mobile USA.
He holds a master’s in engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a bachelor’s from Osmania University in Hyderabad.
What Has Changed Around Him
The exit lands in the middle of the deepest restructuring in Lucid‘s history.
Chief executive Silvio Napoli, who assumed the role on June 1, announced on July 2 that he was halving the number of executives reporting directly to him, naming six people to a new global leadership team.
Raja Ramana Macha, the incoming Chief Technology Officer, started this month, and Alexander De Bock arrived as Chief Financial Officer with a mandate he described as execution, cost discipline and rebuilding confidence.
Chandra’s departure removes one of the last executives hired in the run-up to the 2021 public listing.
He was named in a press release filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on May 5 that year alongside chief financial officer Sherry House, who left in December 2023 and is now chief financial officer of Ford, and software validation vice President Margaret Burgraff, who left in 2024.
The latest departures leave design chief Derek Jenkins, who joined in July 2015, as the last member of the founding leadership team assembled under founder Peter Rawlinson.
His role was recently changed to Chief Creative Officer, after being listed as Senior VP of Design and Brand as recently as June.
Jenkins joined the Saudi-backed EV maker six years before Lucid went public, at a time the company was still named ‘Atieva.’
