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Learn more about Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program hiring partner Mercedes-Benz. Axel Green, Head of Autonomous Driving for Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America, talk about the company's history in autonomous technology and the skills they're looking for in future employees.
Want to start a career in the self-driving car industry? Apply to the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program today: https://www.udacity.com/drive
00:13 My name is Axel Gern.
00:14 I'm Head of Autonomous Driving here at Mercedes Benz Research and
Development in North America
00:19 in Sunnyvale.
00:20 We started the group three years ago, out of a team of seven people and we
have grown
00:25 it now up to six teams.
00:27 I'm really excited to work on that hot topic.
00:32 We have a very long tradition in Autonomous Driving at Mercedes-Benz.
00:35 We drove autonomously on the highway already 20 years ago during the
Prometheus project.
00:41 The latest big achievement was driving the historic world events route
from Manhattan
00:47 to Ford ham in showing that driving on country roads and inner city
traffic is possible.
00:54 We introduced the stop and go assist in which allows you to drive semi
autonomously in stop
01:01 and go traffic.
01:02 And we recently launched the drive pilot, which allows you to drive semi
autonomously
01:08 on highways.
01:10 So we take autonomous driving very seriously, and I think we have been
really successful in that field.
01:16 When hiring people for the autonomous driving, we're looking for strong
computer science
01:21 skills especially programming in C++.
01:25 In addition for prototypes, we're using MATLAB and we are using Python for
scripting and
01:32 deep learning tools perspective.
01:34 We are looking at a general good understanding about autonomous driving
and how that works.
01:40 And we are looking at the solid foundation in terms of math, statistics,
probabilistic and algorithms
01:50 When preparing for the interview, the applicants should brush up their
programming skills.
01:55 Secondly, they should think about how their experience and education fits
to the job.
02:02 Some applicants are surprised to hear questions, how does an autonomous
system works and then
02:08 people should prepare that in advance, should have an understanding,
what's going on in that field.
02:14 And also, what Mercedes has already achieved in that field.
02:18 Personally, I want to see in the interview from the applicant that he or
she is interested,
02:24 motivated, curious about the topic, wants to learn how it works.
02:30 At Mercedes, we have lots of interns and we are happy to train people to
get the right
02:37 skills and get experience in the field.
02:39 We have employees from all around the world from China, from India, from
Germany, from
02:44 the US, from France, from Spain, from actually all around the world.
02:50 I think, the degree is a great thing to get the right experience in that
field.
02:56 So if you have already a really solid foundation in computer science, for
example, and you
03:02 have successfully achieved the degree you are a pretty good candidate for
this.
03:09 First of all, I love the topics of working on autonomous driving is
terrific.
03:13 Probably, I have the best job in the world right now.
03:17 Working in Mercedes also is highly motivating because we can bring
autonomous cars to reality.
03:23 People are coming here because they are motivated to work in the best
project in the world I think.
03:28 They are keen to work on it.
03:29 They're focused on getting their job done and explore new ways of solving
this really
03:36 challenging task of autonomous driving.
03:39 In terms of teamwork and culture and the collaboration, it's awesome in
here.
03:44 So we have a highly motivated team working together to solve the problems.
03:50 It's also- I love to come to work every day.
03:52 If you want to shape the future for autonomous cars at Mercedes Benz,
apply.