Region's self-driving car companies say they are struggling to find candidates for open jobsZack Katic can’t seem to fill positions fast enough at Argo AI.
As the company’s head of recruiting, Katic said rapid expansion is a driving factor at propelling the company further ahead in the race for the first fully autonomous vehicle. “All we know is growth here,” Katic said. “I’ve seen us grow from just about a few dozen or so to where we are now, which is around 250 employees, in just a two-year span, which has been absolutely incredible.” |
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Katic said these 250 employees work here in Pittsburgh, but the company has 500 workers around the country. Argo is confident in its selection of Pittsburgh as its base, Katic said, but rapid growth has required an increase in full-time employees from the region.
“If you were in our cafeteria in Pittsburgh, you would run into new employees on a weekly basis,” Katic said. “Our growth continues to accelerate.”
This has been the case at the region’s autonomous vehicle companies, an industry that has been rapidly growing over the past couple of years. In its “Inflection Point 2017-18” report, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development listed autonomous vehicles as a promising industry that will have growing talent demand, with Pittsburgh at the time seeing 324 percent year-over-year job growth related to autonomous vehicles, six times faster than national growth in that sector.
“If you were in our cafeteria in Pittsburgh, you would run into new employees on a weekly basis,” Katic said. “Our growth continues to accelerate.”
This has been the case at the region’s autonomous vehicle companies, an industry that has been rapidly growing over the past couple of years. In its “Inflection Point 2017-18” report, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development listed autonomous vehicles as a promising industry that will have growing talent demand, with Pittsburgh at the time seeing 324 percent year-over-year job growth related to autonomous vehicles, six times faster than national growth in that sector.
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For Argo, the company has had the backing of Ford Motor Co., and earlier this month it received a $2.6 billion infusion from Volkswagen.
“We’ve continued to see year-over-year substantial amount of growth across all roles,” Katic said. “There are varying skill sets here in the area, specifically coming from the local universities focusing on computer science, and I think that was the reason for initially headquartering here based on that abundance of talent alone.” |
“If you were in our cafeteria in Pittsburgh, you would run into new employees on a weekly basis. Our growth continues to accelerate.”
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Katic said the company is looking for those with backgrounds in computer science, hardware and software, but also for test specialists or administrators with experience in accounting, finance, legal or human resources. In total, Argo has 69 open positions in Pittsburgh.
“Of course software is a big piece of what our product is, but it takes a lot of different skills to bring everything together, and it requires a lot of infrastructure surrounding it,” Katic said. “It really takes all kinds of people to make this thing work.”
The same is true for Aurora Innovation, another self-driving startup in Pittsburgh, which has benefited from the talent coming out of local universities.
“Many of our current employees already called Pittsburgh home when they joined Aurora, and many others have moved to the city to work at Aurora,” said Faryl Ury, a spokesperson for the company.
Aurora is co-headquartered in Pittsburgh and Palo Alto, California, and also has offices in San Francisco. The company employs 250 workers, of which almost 100 are in Pittsburgh.
The company has received over $600 million in funding from investors including Amazon and Sequoia Capital. In Pittsburgh, there are 39 open positions at Aurora, with needs ranging from engineers to specialists and technicians to technical artists.
Growth also has been prevalent at Uber Technologies Inc., the region’s largest employer for self-driving car technology, where new tactics have had to be implemented in order to find the necessary talent to fill the nearly 100 roles currently open in the area.
“We have our postings online, but we are also trying to think of what are the most innovative ways to recruit top talent,” said Frits Bigham, a recruiting manager at Uber, which employs the majority of its 1,200 workers focused on self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh. “We’ve started to do roadshows where we’re taking a group of engineers to a select city … and doing two-to-three day recruiting efforts that involve tech talks, dinners and then interviews to get people excited to work for Uber ATG in Pittsburgh.”
Bigham said the roadshows have been successful at encouraging people to come to Pittsburgh and seek positions with Uber in its autonomous vehicle efforts. It is easier, Bigham said, for Uber to go where the talent is instead of having the talent come to Pittsburgh.
“I think a lot of times from a recruiting standpoint, we try to work smarter in the sense of having open roles and posting roles that many people would apply to and then once they apply finding out where they would fit in the organization,” Bigham said. “Our hiring numbers are continuing to grow. … We’ll have to take innovative approaches to hit (our) targets from the recruiting end.”
Aptiv, another autonomous vehicle developer with a significant presence in Pittsburgh, did not respond to requests for comment.
“Of course software is a big piece of what our product is, but it takes a lot of different skills to bring everything together, and it requires a lot of infrastructure surrounding it,” Katic said. “It really takes all kinds of people to make this thing work.”
The same is true for Aurora Innovation, another self-driving startup in Pittsburgh, which has benefited from the talent coming out of local universities.
“Many of our current employees already called Pittsburgh home when they joined Aurora, and many others have moved to the city to work at Aurora,” said Faryl Ury, a spokesperson for the company.
Aurora is co-headquartered in Pittsburgh and Palo Alto, California, and also has offices in San Francisco. The company employs 250 workers, of which almost 100 are in Pittsburgh.
The company has received over $600 million in funding from investors including Amazon and Sequoia Capital. In Pittsburgh, there are 39 open positions at Aurora, with needs ranging from engineers to specialists and technicians to technical artists.
Growth also has been prevalent at Uber Technologies Inc., the region’s largest employer for self-driving car technology, where new tactics have had to be implemented in order to find the necessary talent to fill the nearly 100 roles currently open in the area.
“We have our postings online, but we are also trying to think of what are the most innovative ways to recruit top talent,” said Frits Bigham, a recruiting manager at Uber, which employs the majority of its 1,200 workers focused on self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh. “We’ve started to do roadshows where we’re taking a group of engineers to a select city … and doing two-to-three day recruiting efforts that involve tech talks, dinners and then interviews to get people excited to work for Uber ATG in Pittsburgh.”
Bigham said the roadshows have been successful at encouraging people to come to Pittsburgh and seek positions with Uber in its autonomous vehicle efforts. It is easier, Bigham said, for Uber to go where the talent is instead of having the talent come to Pittsburgh.
“I think a lot of times from a recruiting standpoint, we try to work smarter in the sense of having open roles and posting roles that many people would apply to and then once they apply finding out where they would fit in the organization,” Bigham said. “Our hiring numbers are continuing to grow. … We’ll have to take innovative approaches to hit (our) targets from the recruiting end.”
Aptiv, another autonomous vehicle developer with a significant presence in Pittsburgh, did not respond to requests for comment.
