Here’s how Musk hired Indian-origin Tesla’s autopilot head

San Francisco, Jan 2 Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to reveal how he chose Ashok Elluswamy from India to work as an autopilot team director at his electric vehicle company.

Elluswamy was actually the first employee to be hired for Tesla’s Autopilot team, with Musk actually using Twitter to ask people to apply for the role back in 2015.

“I tweeted that Tesla is about to launch an auto pilot team. Through that tweet, Ashok was the first to be selected in the auto pilot team,” Musk said in a tweet.

Before joining Tesla, he has worked with WABCO Vehicle Control System and has interned with Volkswagon Electronic Research Lab.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the College of Engineering Guindy, Chennai and a Master’s degree in Robotics System Development from Carnegie Mellon University.

As per a LinkedIn endorsement from Elluswamy’s professor at CMU, John Dalon, he was one of the top students and showed initiative in learning a wide variety of topics.

Recently, Musk tweeted that he is hiring Artificial Intelligence (AI) engineers who are passionate about solving day-to-day problems through AI.

“As always, Tesla is looking for hardcore AI engineers who care about solving problems that directly affect people’s lives in a major way,” Musk tweeted along with a link to apply for the job.

Interested candidates can apply by filling in fields like name, email, exceptional work done in software, hardware or AI, dropping their resume in the PDF format and hitting the Apply option.

In a 2014 interview, Musk said he looked for “evidence of exceptional ability” in a potential employee, rather than a degree from a prestigious university.

“There is no need even to have a college degree at all, or even high school,” Musk said during an interview with the German automotive publication Auto Bild about his hiring preferences more broadly.