Waymo has poached a top Tesla audio engineer to lead the In-car Audio and Infotainment experience inside its autonomous vehicles.
Tesla and Waymo have a sort of rivalry as they are both working toward deploying autonomous driving systems.
Earlier this year, there was a little back and forth about having the biggest service area in Austin, even though the competition was sort of unfair since Waymo has been opreating a true level 4 autonmous driving system in the Texas capital while Tesla’s Robotaxi system is still being supervised by employees inside the vehicles.
But the competition is also for talent.
Last year, Waymo hired Tesla’s head of vehicle programs and the company has continued to hire some vehicle engineers and technicians since.
Now, we learn that Waymo has poached Nikhil Satish, a top audio engineer from Tesla.
He announced on LinkedIn last week:
I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Technical Leader of Audio Systems at Waymo!
Satish already had an extensive career in audio engineering with NVIDIA and Amazon before joining Tesla in 2021.
At Tesla, Satish led the audio engineering of the Cybertruck, which has been praised for its audio system.
The company even noted it yesterday:
More recently, he also led audio engineering on Tesla’s semi truck and humanoid robot programs, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Now, he will be the technical lead for in-car audio and infotainment experience at Waymo.
While Waymo’s core technology is autonomous driving, the audio and video experience is expected to be increasingly important as passengers can put their attention toward other things than driving.
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