AI Engineers: The autonomous-vehicle industry wants you: Cruise's AI chief, Hussein Mehanna, talks jobs, careers, and self-driving cars - [Spectral Lines]

Three years ago, Cruise, an autonomous-vehicle startup acquired by General Motors, had about 50 employees. At the beginning of 2019, the head count at its San Francisco headquarters—mostly software engineers working on projects involving machine learning and artificial intelligence—hit around 1,000. Now that number is up to 1,500, and likely to reach about 2,000 by year-end, sprawling into a building that had housed Dropbox. And that's not counting the 200 or so tech workers that Cruise is aiming to install in a Seattle satellite development center and a handful of others in Phoenix and Pasadena, Calif. ¶ Cruise's recent hires aren't all engineers—it takes more than engineering talent to manage operations. And there are hundreds of so-called safety drivers that are required to sit in the 180 or so test vehicles whenever they roam San Francisco. But that's still a lot of AI experts to be hiring in a time of AI engineer shortages. ¶ Hussein Mehanna, head of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Cruise, says the company's hiring is on track, due to the appeal of the challenge of autonomous vehicles. Mehanna himselfjoined Cruise in May 2019 from Google, where he was director of engineering at Google Cloud AI. ¶ Mehanna has been immersed in AI and machine-learning research since his graduate studies in speech recognition and natural-language processing at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. I sat down with him to talk about his career, the challenges of recruiting AI experts, and autonomous-vehicle development in general. [Editor's note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.]