When I joined Level 5 eighteen months ago to lead the core software efforts, the team had five software engineers, five hardware engineers, and one challenge: build a self-driving car. Now when I go to work, I enter an office with 300 engineers and a small but growing fleet of test vehicles. While I’m proud of the velocity of our team’s accomplishment, it took a lot more than just speed. We had to be extremely thoughtful about how we built and nurtured our team.
Developing self-driving technology is one of the most challenging engineering problems of our time. While working on 3D graphics at Microsoft and mobile at Facebook, I learned that for any major engineering challenge you need to build a team that matches its scale and magnitude in order to succeed. Then, even if you manage to hire the ideal team, ensuring productivity scales with the growing team is a challenge of its own.