From Tesla Motors, the electric car producers, Robert Rose has just moved to Google as software engineer. This is not his first career move within the software industry. He started work in at HP while he concluded his master’s degree program at Oregon State University.
From there, he moved to Sony, where he developed the PSP games – Siphon Filter: Dark Mirror, and Resistance: Retribution. His next move was to SpaceX in 2009 where he worked as the lead software engineer on its Falcon 9 and Dragon flights. He rose to become the Director of Flight Software until he left the company in mid-2014.
After an interlude at Vicarious, Rose moved to Tesla in May, where he spent 6 months leading the autopilot team which worked on the Autosteer and Auto Lane Change functions for its v7.0 update of its autonomous driving project.
He left immediately after the release of the Autopilot program, and he was hired by Google just a month later. His stated position is software engineer at Google Robotics.
Intra-industry career moves are becoming commonplace in the high tech world of software development. Just before Rose left Tesla, Google had named, as CEO for its self-driving car project (which is included in Google Robotics), John Krafcik who formerly worked at Ford and later, Hyundai America.
As Rose moved to Google from Tesla, Liang Heng moved to Tesla from Google, having worked at the Google Maps Street View program for a year and half.
Actually, with the rise of the use of software enabled technology, headhunting of software engineers is an ongoing phenomenon. Apple would hire employees Tesla, and Tesla would hire employees from Apple. Lotus and Faraday Future are also involved in the practice, and Google is not different.
Google Robotics, unveiled about two years ago, contains almost ten companies including Boston Dynamics, Schaft, Redwood Robotics and the self-driving car program.
The goal of Google Robotics is to launch its consumer robot technology by 2024. With this ambitious project, the company is rapidly becoming the largest pool of top software engineering talents.
