Sameer Qureshi has left his role as a senior manager of Tesla Autopilot Programs and has joined Lyft, according to his LinkedIn. We first saw the news over on Electrek. Tesla declined to comment, but Lyft confirmed Qureshi joined the team this week.
At Lyft, Qureshi is now director of product for autonomous driving, specifically focused on Lyft’s Level 5 self-driving car efforts. To be clear, Level 5 is when a car requires no human to be at the wheel. In fact, Level 5 prohibits humans from intervening, even if they want to.
At Tesla, Qureshi was “responsible for the entire Autopilot software stack across all of Tesla’s cars and platforms” for more than one year, he wrote on his LinkedIn. To be clear, Qureshi was not an executive, VP or director, but one of 4,000 managers at Tesla. Prior to his most recent role at Tesla, Qureshi served as senior manager for software and firmware programs at Tesla for more than two years.
Lyft first launched its self-driving car division in July 2017. Since then, Lyft has partnered with tier-one automotive industry supplier Magna on autonomous vehicle technology. Magna also invested $200 million in Lyft in exchange for an equity stake.