UPDATE [March 16, 8:30 am]: While Krikorian’s departure from Uber ATC had previously been reported by internal sources, the man has now himself confirmed the same via Twitter. Here’s his tweet:
i’m leaving @uber today. thanks, ATC, for everything. pic.twitter.com/JizNjCVjqY
— uɐᴉɹoʞᴉɹʞ ᴉɟɟɐɹ (@raffi) March 15, 2017
PREVIOUSLY: Post Google Waymo’s allegations of patent infringement, Uber is now facing management exodus at the senior-level. One of its most prominent self-driving engineers, Raffi Krikorian, has decided to step down from his role at Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh, reports Recode. He had cited family commitments as the primary reason for his surprising departure.
According to an internal email to the team, Krikorian bid adieu saying that he wanted to devote more of his time to his family — who’re moving to California. Further, he added that he might make a return at a later time but not in the current role he was appointed at. The memo, with regards to the same, read,
When I’m ready to jump back in, I’ll figure out where I may be able to best help the ATG at that time.
He is stepping down from his role of senior director of engineering at Uber ATC after a good couple years of working on the upcoming self-driving technology. Krikorian was roped in from Twitter, where he was the VP of Engineering, to lead the autonomy efforts of the ride-hailing giant back in March 2015. He was leading a team of 450 staff members working on the core Twitter platform, whereas he was working with a close-knit team of 50 academics and researchers from CMU at Uber’s research centre.
Thus, Uber is now looking for a new and permanent replacement to lead their software engineering team. In the interim, most of the senior-level will continue to function in their current positions, such as David Stager will continue as Autonomy lead & Don Burnette will continue as Autonomy tech lead.
The software team, including AVMaps will now bee handed over to Paw Anderson. He is moving to join the Advanced Technologies Center from Uber HQ, where he led the Business Infrastructure and Marketplace teams. All three of them will report to former Otto co-founder and current head of Uber’s autonomy efforts Anthony Levandowski.
Recode further mentions that Krikorian is just one of the engineers from a series of those who have recently made their exit from the ride-hailing giant. And it is quick to speculate that the departures, mostly comprising of CMU academics, started when Uber acquired the self-driving truck company Otto for $680 million last year. And most of its team was appointed to lead the autonomous efforts of the company.
And as mentioned above, this development comes on the heels of surprising patent infringement allegations from Google’s spin-off self-driving entity Waymo. The patent infringement is laying a significant bit of interest on the LiDAR technology. And that one of their former employees, Anthony Levandowski (surprise! surprise!) downloaded nearly 14,000 highly confidential and proprietary design files for their hardware systems.
