Waymo hires former Tesla Autopilot engineer to lead self-driving hardware efforts

Alphabet’s self-driving car unit Waymo has snatched a former Tesla engineer to lead its hardware efforts. According to a new report from Bloomberg, Waymo has hired Satish Jeyachandran, Tesla’s former director of hardware engineering…

Jeyachandran spent nearly seven years at Tesla before departing earlier this year. At Tesla, he was the company’s director of hardware engineering, tasked with hardware development and execution of infotainment and Autopilot systems.

In a post on LinkedIn, the former Tesla engineer explained that Waymo has a talented and mission driven team that has developed technology with the potential to “save millions of lives.”

“I wanted to join Waymo because it has a talented, mission-driven team that has made impressive advancements in self-driving hardware,” Jeyachandran said in a statement on LinkedIn. “This technology offers incredible potential to save millions of lives.”

I’ve always wanted to be part of something that can have a meaningful impact well beyond my own personal contributions. Self-driving cars are one of those things. This technology offers incredible potential to save millions of lives, and I’m looking forward to working with the team at Waymo.

Alphabet lost a notable amount of self-driving talent last year, with one report claiming that many employees left because they were being paid too much. Self-driving chief Chris Urmson departed to lead his own self-driving startup, which has since raised over $3 million, while Alphabet’s Waymo also lost two other key software engineers around the same time.

Interestingly, Urmson’s startup is made up of Sterling Anderson, who was previously the head of Tesla’s Autopilot, as well as Uber, Google, and other companies.