Welcoming Jinnah

Jinnah is joining Aurora as our VP of Software Engineering.

If your goal is to get to the moon, you can show daily progress by building a taller ladder. However, despite getting incrementally closer, the ladder will never actually get you to the moon; for that, you need a different approach. The more effective way to get there is to design, build, and fuel a rocket ship. You don’t get off the ground as quickly, but with leadership, experience and hard work, when you do it’s exciting.

At Aurora, we’re taking the rocket ship approach to self driving technology. We’re building our autonomy system from the ground up, eschewing demo-ware, and focusing on rigorous engineering and thoughtfully applying machine learning. We work with partners who can build cars at massive scale so that we can achieve our mission of delivering the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. This mission will help save millions of lives, provide better access to mobility, and make our cities more livable.

Our rocket ship metaphor becomes a bit more poignant today as we welcome Jinnah Hosein, previously SpaceX’s VP of software. That’s right, Jinnah has spent the last few years building software for actual rockets. At SpaceX, he helped develop their software process and contributed to 40 launches, including delivering the software for landing their reusable rocket boosters. The accomplishment he’s most proud of is the successful Falcon Heavy launch; an accomplishment that we all cheered at Aurora! Before SpaceX, Jinnah spent a decade at Google and was an original member of the organization that later became known as Site Reliability Engineering. During his tenure there, he helped build Google’s front-end infrastructure systems and public serving systems and helped deliver early parts of Google’s cloud computing platform.

Now that he’s joined us at Aurora, we’re looking forward to him applying his experience to building a safe and awesome self-driving platform.