Elon Musk, the rock star CEO of Tesla Motors, is about to start personally interviewing some job applicants.
He is extremely eager to hire software engineers to help soup up Tesla’s self-driving car features.
Self driving cars are the holy grail for automakers and tech companies alike, as they all race to come up with the first true self-driving car.
Still, it’s tough to picture the CEOs of GM or Google getting involved at this level.
But in a series of tweets late Thursday Musk said that he’ll be conducting the interviews for these positions.
“Ramping up the autopilot software team at Tesla to achieve generalized full autonomy,” he tweeted. “We are looking for hardcore software engineers. No prior experience with cars required. This is a super high priority.”
Tesla rolled out the autopilot feature on its Model S sedans a month ago.
With the feature, the car can change lanes and stop to avoid accidents by itself, and even look for parking places and parallel park itself. It’s one of the more sophisticated self-driving features now offered by any automaker. And Tesla promises its cars will have even more sophisticated features soon, including the ability to drop off the driver and go park itself in a parking lot.
But Tesla says autopilot is still in the beta testing stage and it has been dogged by some glitches. Some Tesla owners have posted videos showing frightening failures of the program in which they had to grab the wheel and take control of the car to avoid an accident. Tesla has advised drivers to keep their hands on the wheel even when using autopilot.
Tesla spokespeople did not respond to questions about the company’s plans, such as how many software engineers it is looking to hire.
Musk will find the competition for talent to work on self-driving cars to be fierce.
Not only are traditional automakers such as GM and Ford making major pushes into developing their own self-driving car features, but non automakers are actively doing so as well.
Google has been working for years on a self-driving car, as has auto parts maker Delphi. Recently, Apple has begin to hire auto engineers and to test self-driving car features. Even car ride service Uber is developing its own self-driving cars.
