Tencent Gathers Autonomous Tech Team In CA

Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings is looking to hire self-driving car engineers in Palo Alto, California.

“We are building a research team for our Auto-drive Team based in Palo Alto, CA,” the company said in job advertisements on LinkedIn, according to Reuters. There are at least nine postings for engineering positions in areas including motion planning, sensor fusion, vehicle intelligence and machine learning. The postings date back between two weeks and a month.

Earlier this month it was reported that the company wanted to expand into industries such as healthcare and connected cars as it faces tougher regulations in its home country.

In September, China’s largest social media and gaming company announced a major restructuring for the first time in six years. The move came after the Chinese government took steps to tighten control over its internet sector, from mobile gaming to mobile payments, even as some of the biggest firms compete more fiercely with one another for eyeballs, wallet share and, of course, game play.

As a result, Tencent executives decided to consolidate three content business groups to one unit and implement a new group for cloud and smart industries. In addition, the company will “further explore the integration of social, content and technology that is more suitable for future trends and promote the upgrade from consumer internet to industrial internet.” It will also create a technology committee to help bolster its research and development, as well as foster collaboration and innovation.

“If the development of internet is said to have centered on consumers over the past 20 years, it will probably focus on business and industry over the next 20 years,” Dowson Tong, president of Tencent’s newly formed Cloud and Smart Industries Group, said.

Tencent vice president Zhong Xiangping also revealed the company’s autonomous driving business was a software and services provider, as well as a unit that offers cloud services to business partners in connected cars. Tencent has already received road testing licenses in Shenzhen and Beijing.

The Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported in May that Tencent had received permission by the city of Shenzhen to test self-driving cars on some public roads.