Shahaf Abileah
Shahaf Abileah

Ari Steinberg has been pretty quiet ever since he left Facebook last year to start a new online travel startup. And while we still don’t know too much about what Steinberg is cooking up, we do know who is joining him on the voyage.

Shahaf Abileah, a former engineer at Microsoft and Redfin, has joined as the stealthy company’s first employee.

“I threw caution to the wind and decided to join Ari Steinberg in his new travel startup,” writes Abileah on his LinkedIn page. “Being the first hire, my role is broad. I’m officially a software developer and I’m focusing on the back end, but I’m also helping with front end, product vision, hiring, etc.”

Abileah worked at Redfin from 2007 to January 2013, taking a year off during that spell to travel around the world with his wife. At Redfin, Abileah helped build the company’s marketplaces effort, a service designed to match real estate agents, mortgage lenders and others with home buyers and home sellers.

Before Redfin, he worked on the Virtual Earth team at Microsoft, perhaps an experience that will serve University of Michigan-trained computer scientist well at the travel startup.

Steinberg is a Stanford-trained computer scientist who previously served as the engineering site director for Facebook’s growing Seattle office. We’ve reached out to him for comment, and we’ll update this post as we hear more. 

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