The famous electric automaker, Tesla, hired one of the key software engineers at Apple. Chris Lattner, who worked 11 years at Apple will oversee the Autopilot self-driving software in Tesla.

The announcement was made by Tesla in a blog post on Tuesday. As well Chris Lattner said in an online message to Apple developers that he would depart from Apple to take another opportunity, but he did not mention what company he was about to join. He was hired as vice-president of the autopilot software by Tesla.

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Lattner announced that he would be leaving Apple after over a decade at the company where created and developed the Swift programming language. Image Credit: Appadvice

“We are very excited that Chris is joining Tesla to lead our Autopilot engineering team and accelerate the future of autonomous driving”. Wrote Tesla. “Chris’s reputation for engineering excellence is well known.”

Chris Lattner is a high profile software engineer

After 11 years working for Apple, Chris Latter, one of the most important developers at the company, decided to leave Apple behind to pursue another professional opportunity at Tesla Motors. Lattner served in Apple as a Senior Director in the developer’s tools department. He was known for developing Swift, which is a programming language that allows software developers to write Apps for iOS in an easy way. iOS is the operating system used by Apple in iPhones and iPads.

Moreover, Lattner successfully managed to make the programming language “open source,” which means that the developers could incorporate the program into their applications without needing to pay anything to Apple. Apple is not the only one that has done it. Microsoft Corp and Google have contributed to open-source programming languages. As well, before he joined Apple, he was a lead author the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, which is an open source umbrella that is used currently in commercial products and academic research.

Therefore it is a great move to Tesla, a company that is taking away from Apple one of their high-profile engineers. Tesla made the announcement on its web page on Tuesday, saying that Lattner would become the Vice-President of the Autopilot software. However, it did not say when Chris Lattner would begin to work. The announcement was summited after Lattner announced its team at Apple he would go this month to work somewhere else. Apple already confirmed Lattner’s departure.

Tesla thanked the whole team at Autopilot

Tesla’s autopilot team didn’t have a full-time leader before Chris. It was overseen on an interim basis by Jinnah Hosein, while she was the software chief at SpaceX. In the blog post, Tesla took the time to thank Hosein for her time to successfully overseeing the division and her position at SpaceX. As well, they thanked David Nister, Tesla’s Vice President of Autopilot Vision and the whole team.

“As Chris joins Tesla, we would like to give a special thanks to Jinnah Hosein, SpaceX’s Vice President of Software, who has been serving a dual role as the interim Vice President of Tesla Autopilot Software and will now be heading back to SpaceX full-time” stated Tesla on Tuesday.

Autopilot is the hardware and software system on Tesla vehicles, what focuses on creating self-driving electric cars. However, it still requires the person behind the wheel to be aware.

Source: CBNC