Work History
Tesla
- VP Autopilot Software
January 30 - June 20, 2017When I joined Tesla, it was in the midst of a hardware transition from "Hardware 1" Autopilot (based primarily on MobileEye for vision processing) to "Hardware 2", which uses an in-house designed TeslaVision stack. The team was facing many tough challenges given the nature of the transition. My primary contributions over these fast five months were:
- We evolved Autopilot for HW2 from its first early release (which had few features and was limited to 45mph on highways) to effectively parity with HW1, and surpassing it in some ways (e.g. silky smooth control).
- This required building and shipping numerous features for HW2, including: support for local roads, Parallel Autopark, High Speed Autosteer, Summon, Lane Departure Warning, Automatic Lane Change, Low Speed AEB, Full Speed Autosteer, Pedal Misapplication Mitigation, Auto High Beams, Side Collision Avoidance, Full Speed AEB, Perpendicular Parking, and 'silky smooth' performance.
- This was done by shipping a total of 7 major feature releases, as well as numerous minor releases to support factory, service, and other narrow markets.
- One of Tesla's huge advantages in the autonomous driving space is that it has tens of thousands of cars already on the road. We built infrastructure to take advantage of this, allowing the collection of image and video data from this fleet, as well as building big data infrastructure in the cloud to process and use it.
- I defined and drove the feature roadmap, drove the technical architecture for future features, and managed the implementation for the next exciting features to come.
- I advocated for and drove a major rewrite of the deep net architecture in the vision stack, leading to significantly better precision, recall, and inference performance.
- I ended up growing the Autopilot Software team by over 50%. I personally interviewed most of the accepted candidates.
- I made massive improvements to internal infrastructure and processes that I cannot go into detail about.
- I was closely involved with others in the broader Autopilot program, including future hardware support, legal, homologation, regulatory, marketing, etc.
Overall I learned a lot, worked my butt off, met a lot of great people, and had a lot of fun. I'm still a firm believer in Tesla, its mission, and the exceptional Autopilot team: I wish them well.
