Delphi looks to add 100 new jobs
Autonomous vehicle firm bolstering tech team
At O’Hara’s RIDC Industrial Park, a player in the autonomous vehicles space plans to nearly triple its technology team with a hiring spree of more than 100 employees over the next year.
No, it’s not Uber.
United Kingdom-based Delphi Automotive, PLC, which acquired Carnegie Mellon University spinoff Ottomatika in 2015, intends to pad out its team of technical employees, currently numbered between 50-60, to at least 150 engineers and administrators in the next year.
Delphi, a global public company with technology centers in 15 cities, piloted a self-driving vehicle nicknamed “the Roadrunner” 3,400 miles from San Francisco to New York in 2015, but all paths lead to Pittsburgh, where much of the software development is happening.
“Pittsburgh is actually a very good market ... it’s a smaller market when you think about roboticists or software engineers,” said Glen De Vos, senior vice president and CTO of Delphi. “But it has a really good supply.”
Mr. De Vos said Delphi’s intent, through expansion, is to continue automated vehicle algorithm development.
At the Pittsburgh lab, Delphi’s team already is working on such algorithms, which may detect pedestrians and other obstacles. The technology center’s other focuses
include work with software systems, which involves helping various pieces of the car to communicate with one another, and prototype builds, which demonstrate the capabilities of an autonomous driving platform.
In May, the technology company confirmed it had been testing its fleet of selfdriving Audi SV5s in Pittsburgh.
Mr. De Vos said Delphi is expanding its existing pool of cars to include different models, including BMW 5 Series vehicles.
With the uptick in robot cars, comes an expansion of Delphi’s local engineering pool.
Some of the job listings on Delphi’s website include positions for project managers; automated driving engineers in motion planning, perception and localization; research and development software engineers; systems administrators and a devOps (development and operations) engineer. There are multiple openings for each position.
“It will be a mix of new hires right out of college and some experienced engineers from other companies,” Mr. De Vos said. “In general, though, we found that hiring locally has some real advantages ... to the extent that we can hire locally, we will.”
Delphi currently operates out of Ottomatika’s original headquarters in RIDC Industrial Park in O’Hara, but the company already is outgrowing the space.
The company already has consumed adjacent buildings. With the expansion, it hopes to move closer to the city by the early part of next year, according to Mr. De Vos.
He did not give a potential name for the new center, but did note that Delphi wants to build awareness of the Ottomatika brand, hopefully retaining some cultural element from the original CMU team.
He also noted that close engagement with local universities and city government is vital.
“What’s helpful is when we really engage in a collaborative, mutually beneficial relationship,” he said.
Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, through an email from communications director Timothy McNulty, lauded the growth opportunity that Delphi’s expansion presents.
“This is great news from Delphi, and further validation of Pittsburgh's global leadership in autonomous vehicle technology.
“As the industry grows, job growth is following, too.”
With that job growth, though, comes the risk of job poaching.
In 2015, Uber hired away a third of CMU’s researchers at the National Robotics Engineering Center for its Advanced Technologies Center in the Strip District, a routine occurrence for those in academic research, said Andrew Moore, dean of the School of Computer Science.
John M. Dolan, principal systems scientist at CMU’s Robotics Institute and a formative member of Ottomatika, said he doesn’t believe that’s Delphi’s aim, based on his interactions with the company.
“I know Delphi’s intent is not to raid CMU or create any problems for us,” he said. “I think there is always a line you have to walk there because it may be that certain people here with talent may want to move to Delphi or another institution.”
As long as Delphi establishes a good relationship with CMU, he said, the hiring spree should give the school’s graduates more options when job searching, and should prove fruitful for Pittsburgh as a whole.
He noted that Delphi’s work likely would overlap with Uber’s autonomous vehicles research and development.
“I think competition, generally, is good,” he said.
The crowd of players in the autonomous vehicles field in Pittsburgh also includes Ford and its $1 billion investment in Strip District-based artificial intelligence startup Argo AI, and an emerging startup called Aurora Innovation, led by former employees of Tesla, Google and Uber.