Ep. 22 | Cruise’s Sr. VP of Engineering, Mo ElShenawy, on Developing Autonomous Vehicles

To say that autonomous vehicles represent a huge number of engineering challenges is an understatement. To some engineers, they seem insurmountable. To others, like Mo ElShenawy, they're part of another day at the office.

This week, Dave speaks with Mo ElShenawy, Senior VP of Engineering for Cruise. Cruise began as a startup out of Y Combinator and rose to prominence as a powerhouse of machine vision and data processing for autonomous vehicle development. Acquired by GM in 2016, Cruise today works with companies like Honda and Microsoft to bring fully autonomous (and zero emissions) vehicles to scale. 

Mo runs Cruise's largest department, leading 1,000+ engineers in what is arguably one of the most significant engineering challenges of our generation. In this episode, you’ll hear Dave and Mo discuss the hardware and software challenges of designing AVs, why AVs should be safer than human drivers, and why Mo doesn’t believe in “tech for tech’s sake.” 

Mohamed “Mo” ElShenawy’s career has spanned several unique industries that share a unifying need for scalable automation technologies. He joined Cruise in 2018, where he now leads over 1,000 engineers as Senior Vice President of Engineering as the team tackles safe, scalable AV deployment, starting with San Francisco.