One of Google's most innovative and influential engineer is due to retire at the end of February. Google senior vice president for search announced that he is retiring. Despite losing one of its top people, Google is replacing him with an equally talented expert.

Singhal is expected to leave his post on Feb. 26. The engineer is influential in spearheading some of the most important technologies developed in Alphabet, Google's parent company.

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According to Re/Code, Singhal is stepping down in order to dedicate his time to his family as well as some philanthropic works.

Singhal joined Google in 2000 as employee No. 176. He hails from India and has earned his doctorate in computer science from Cornell. He also worked with another tech company, AT&T Labs, before joining the search giant.

One of Singhal's earliest job at Google was to rewrite the original algorithm developed by Google's co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

In a 2015 interview with The New York Times, Singhal said, "Algorithms and learnings that we have had for 15 years of running Google are actually coming in tremendously handy in building the future. Without those, we would be lost today.

For some tech analysts, what is really interesting is who will replace Singhal in his post now that he is stepping down. Singhal's successor will play a major role in guiding the company into the right direction.

Several reports claim that John Giannandrea who is currently working in Alphabet's artificial intelligence division, Alphabet AI.

Artificial Intelligence is one of the most important platform Google has been working on for quite some time. The platform helps the search giant in building products and services that can do amazing things like responding to voice commands.

By putting Giannandrea on the top executive spot, Alphabet is hoping that he can capitalize on the technologies created by Singhal in order to push its projects like the self-driving cars. As part of Alphabet's current drive to improve its artificial intelligence division, the company recently acquired DeepMind, the artificial intelligence company that built an A.I. capable of defeating humans in the game of Go.

Giannandrea first came into Google in 2010 a spart of an acquisition of another company, Metaweb Technologies. He has been influential in integrating machine learning technologies into several Google products and services, including smart replies in Gmail Inbox and image recognition in Google Photos.