BMW Group, the company behind the hugely successful BMW, Mini and Rolls Royce brands, is stepping up its autonomous car efforts, Internet of Business can reveal.
The firm, which has previously agreed a partnership with Intel and Mobileye to bring autonomous cars to production by 2021 – but which surprisingly called off a partnership with Chinese giant Baidu last month – is building out its autonomous team in Germany by hiring for an assortment of new job roles.
The firm is currently recruiting for several technical roles for its autonomous cars team, including software integrators, applications specialists, product developers, and sensor scientists, as well as data engineers for machine learning.
These jobs are being advertised on BMW’s German website, as well as a variety of recruiting sites, and the majority of the jobs are based in or near to the firm’s headquarters in Germany. Ironically, given the type of jobs being advertised, I found out about these jobs when LinkedIn’s own algorithms erroneously suggested them to me as a potential career opportunity.
In one ad, for the software developer role, BMW Group says:
“We are offering a very exciting opportunity as a software developer (m/f) in our department for artificial intelligence and machine learning. As part of the team you will implement sophisticated algorithms for autonomous driving and integrate them into extensive software systems.
“With your work, you can contribute to the autonomous vehicle being able to orient itself, accurately assess situations and select the most appropriate and comfortable driving strategy even in complex environments.
“Your focus will be on the safe implementation and real-life validation in the vehicle… Your daily work will involve implementing the most modern algorithms for the next vehicle generations in close cooperation with our experts in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer vision and robotics. You will validate your software solutions continuously in a simulation environment as well as in real vehicles. You will work together in interdisciplinary, agile development teams focused on software for the automobiles of the future.”
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2,000 new jobs at BMW
This hiring spree shouldn’t come as any great surprise, not only given the grand predictions for autonomous cars, but also the fact that German media has recently suggested that BMW Group is hiring 2,000 new jobs at its new German R&D facility for driverless cars. The facility is due to open next year.
“We want to get started in mid-2017,” said a BMW spokesman to news agency dpa recently, further suggesting that this new campus will result in the creation in a variety of new jobs. It has been suggested on industry forums that BMW is looking to increase the number of programmers at the base to around 50 percent, although it is thought to be nearer 20 percent, hence the job adverts.
BMW experts working on autonomous driving have been stationed at the research and development (R&D) center near the Group headquarters and the Munich headquarters, while others are positioned in the suburb of Garching and other locations.
Late last week, the BMW Group announced a partnership with IBM Watson to bring cognitive computing to its future cars.
As Fred Roberts reports, the deal sees a team of researchers and engineers from the car company move into the Watson IoT headquarters in Munich, Germany, where they will work alongside IBM’s own team of researchers, developers and consultants. Together, the two teams hope to discover what Watson’s IoT technologies can offer to improve the future driving experience for BMW drivers.
Internet of Business has contacted BMW Group for further information and will update this article shortly.