Indeed, the world’s largest job search engine, reports that Aptiv is posting far and away the most self-driving car job openings. Aptiv spun out from Delphi, a Tier 1 auto supplier, a few years ago. They also acquired nuTonomy, which at the time of acquisition had logged more self-driving car miles than all but a handful of competitors.
Following Aptiv on the list is NVIDIA, and then SAIC Innovation Center (the Chinese auto supplier, not the US government contractor of the same acronym).
It would be interesting to get an absolute number of jobs from this report, rather than a percentage. When I search Indeed for jobs at SAIC Innovation Center, I only see a handful of listings. But maybe the number has waxed and waned over time.
Bosch and Daimler, which are partnering hand and glove on autonomous technology, come in at 4 and 5.
Meanwhile, Cruise Automation, which is has plastered hiring billboards up and down highway 101 in Silicon Valley, only rings at number 6, followed by GM.
The rankings don’t really match my intuition of who is hiring and how much, but presumably Indeed has data that I don’t.
The report also lists the top geographies for these jobs.
Silicon Valley — Technically this covers two places on the list: #1 San Jose and #4 San Francisco. A combination of Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Google, and a lot of venture capital and software engineers has made this the new center of robotics.
Pittsburgh — Carnegie Mellon University has spawned a bunch of corporate robotics teams, notably Uber ATG, Argo AI and Aurora.
Detroit — The center of the automotive industry, dating back to Henry Ford.
Portland — I assume this is mainly on the list due to Daimler Trucks?
Boston — MIT has not spun out quite as many robotics efforts as CMU, but nuTonomy counts for a lot, and there are other groups, too.
David Silver 