Tesla Continues to Hire Employees Away From Apple
Can these new hires give Tesla vehicles Apple-like quality and reliability?
Tesla is on a hiring spree, and it's finding talent from the rosters of one of its Silicon Valley competitors: Apple. The auto manufacturer announced its recent hire of Chris Lattner as its new Vice President of Autopilot software development. Lattner was employed by Apple, and during his tenure he was the senior software engineer responsible for building developer tools such as Swift, Xcode, CPU and GPU compilers, and low-level tools that support Apple products.
Lattner's role will be to lead Tesla's Autopilot engineering team, a position formerly held by Jinnah Hosein, who served a dual rule as SpaceX’s Vice President of Software and the interim Vice President of Tesla Autopilot Software.
Tesla also managed to steal away designer Matt Casebolt, reports news outlet 9to5Mac.com. Casebolt was on the team designing the MacBook Pro, and will join Tesla as Sr. Director Engineering, Closures & Mechanisms. This recent hire is just one of many employees defecting from Apple in recent months to the Tesla camp, which now includes Senior Vice President of Vehicle Engineering Doug Field, Senior Director of Reliability and Testing David Erhart, and Senior Director of Communications Sarah O’Brien.
The trend could be seen as a bit of karmic payback for Apple, who was recently known for offering Tesla engineers $250,000 signing bonuses to join its secret autonomous vehicle project, code-named "Titan." The electronics giant recently downsized its autonomous vehicle efforts, and rather than build its own vehicle will focus on creating an operating system.
