- Stuart Bowers recently joined Greylock Partners after working as the head of the Autopilot software at Tesla Motors
Stuart Bowers recently joined Greylock Partners as an Executive in Residence. Bowers used to be the VP of Engineering at Tesla Motors and oversaw the Autopilot software built into the vehicles.
In the past few months, there were a number of reports that suggested Tesla was restructuring the Autopilot software team and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk was taking charge of the changes.
Before Bowers’ departure, a number of his responsibilities were removed and some of the team members under him were promoted and are going to directly report to Musk, according to Electrek. For example, Milan Kovac was promoted to Director of Autopilot Software Engineering at Tesla after working in several positions on Tesla’s Autopilot team.
“Most recently, Stuart led the Autopilot Software Team at Tesla, where he managed a team of more than 100 engineers. He focused on taking what was happening with both hardware and computer vision, and packaging it with all the planning, controls and testing, and the operating system to make a viable product that goes on top of people’s cars,” said Greylock partner Josh McFarland in a blog post. “Prior to Tesla, he worked at Snap, Inc. where he led the company’s monetization engineering organization, building a way to monetize their product from the ground up. He focused on understanding users, combining these insights with machine learning, and then turned it into massive scale to make billions of predictions everyday. During his time at Snap, he grew the team from 18 to 200+ engineers and worked with Sales and Product Management to grow annual revenue from $58M in 2015 to $1.18B in 2018.”
And Bowers spent a decade at Microsoft and Facebook switching between the roles of product manager and programmer. At Facebook, he worked on the ad infrastructure team and built Facebook’s first machine learning platform called FBLearner. FBLearner scaled to train models for nearly all aspects of Facebook’s business including ranking the News Feed, making recommendations, and selecting ads.
