Career move from SDE to Autonomous Driving eng
Has anyone made a career move from a software engineer to an autonomous driving eng in Motion planning or perception or anything at Cruise, waymo or zoox or Tesla. I would like to know about their journey, the transition and their preparation. Thanks #tech #career
Are you doing research specifically? If not, you’ll effectively keep working as a SDE the only difference being you’ll learn a different set of domain expertise. There’s a lot of demand for generalist SWEs in the AV space. Disclose your strengths and weaknesses during the interview process, they should be able to start you off in a role that fits your expertise and lets you slowly ramp up on AV specifics like computer vision or planning algorithms. I’ve seen a lot of generalists join specialized teams and work on software problems until they’re ready for feature work.
Assuming you meant core algorithm groups. You prob need to be good at at least one specialty. Research and specific domains like cv and robotics are the best, then the tangential ones like general ml or high performance computing. Then, to domain related skillsets like really good real-time cpp, ml platform and infra, very deep problem framing skills. I think the core issue here is that everyone is under somewhat unrealistic deadline and pressure there’s little room to bring up someone from scratch, even when hiring the right talent is hard.
I did !
I am about to make this jump
do you mind share your journey, prep and anything that might help others in the same boat
curious about this too, i think the general consensus is a lateral jump inside the company to a team working in that
I mean if you are not part of any of these companies, how do you make a switch then
From the questions i have asked it’s join as a SWE for any role and try to do work in related interest and then move laterally, im hoping someone who has done it will comment here