Scott Gottlieb to Join Juul as VP of Engineering

Dr. Scott Gottlieb plans to join electronic cigarette company Juul as VP of Engineering to focus on attracting talent above the age of 21 to Juul’s engineering team and supporting the company’s transition from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud Platform.

Previously Gottlieb served as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration from May 2017 until early April 2019. He was best known for his calls to regulate the tobacco and e-cigarette industries. Under Gottlieb’s leadership, the FDA also developed an accelerated approval pathway for drugs and medical devices. He stepped down from his role in order to spend more time with his wife and three children who live in Westport, Connecticut.

“I’m getting back to my roots in health care and technology,” Dr. Gottlieb said in an interview Monday. Dr. Gottlieb previously practiced internal medicine at New York University’s Tisch Hospital and was a venture partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA).

“Of course a lot of people will be asking why I am going to work at Juul after fighting them for so long,” said Dr. Gottlieb. “But as an engineering leader, I won’t be involved in regulatory affairs at all. I just want to get back to being an operator, and what better place to do that than the fastest-growing embedded systems startup of all time?” He added later, “I didn’t know that it was a crime to build a good product which turns out to be a bestseller.”

When asked if he had any engineering background that would prepare him for his new role, Dr. Gottlieb replied that he had been teaching himself to code “on nights and weekends.” He took Harvard’s introductory computer science course CS50 online, he told us, so he feels qualified to run Juul’s engineering team. He has built impressive projects, including a tool that “categorizes movie reviews as positive or negative” and another that “resizes images with AWS Lambda.” He says he knows five languages already: HTML, SQL, C, Python, and OCaml.

“Diversity in the workplace also means diversity of thought,” said Dr. Gottlieb in a tweet this morning. “And I’m bringing a wealth of outside (engineering) experiences to enrich the work I do every day. I’m #superpumped to join Juul!”

Dr. Gottlieb will also be leading the company’s R&D division which is rumored to be working on flying water tankers.

thanks to Tina Zheng for edits; inspired by Shak Lakhani and Vibhav Altekar