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- 🐺 A San Diego team is running the second-largest self-driving fleet in the world.
🐺 A San Diego team is running the second-largest self-driving fleet in the world.
Plus an SD entrepreneur coalition scaling one of the fastest-growing enterprise AI firms, and a Stanford spinout using software to find the minerals for the electric future.
Openpilot, comma.ai's driver-assist software, runs across 20,000 users with 300 million miles driven and counting. They call it the second-largest self-driving fleet next to Tesla.
Plus a coalition of SD founders scaling an enterprise AI firm in SD, and a startup using software to find the copper, lithium, and rare earths the electric future needs.
Howl yeah, let's dive in.
comma.ai — 9 Open SD Roles
The Android of self-driving cars. Openpilot runs on 325+ car models across 27 brands.
Why they matter:
If Tesla is the iOS of self-driving cars, comma is the Android.
Their positioning: openpilot is open source, ships on the $999 comma four device, and works with the Toyota, Hyundai, Ford, or Honda you already drive.
The team is exclusively on-site in San Diego with no remote roles.
Founded 2016 by George Hotz, who stepped down from day-to-day leadership in October 2022 and remains on the board. On-site only in San Diego, no remote.
Not surprisingly, they have a rather unique hiring process that many larger companies can learn from.
The interview process starts with a public leaderboard: solve a compression challenge or a bounty on GitHub, and comma flies you out for a paid micro-internship.
Almost like being paid to apply for a role with the team, along with a live culture test.
Momentum signals:
50,000 stars on GitHub openpilot's open-source repository
openpilot 0.11 is the first self-driving release trained fully in a learned simulation
comma owns and operates a $5M data center in-house for training
Their technical bet: solve driving as a single machine learning model, not a stack of separate parts.
Open roles across:
Software Engineer, Full Stack Developer, Car Interface Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer
Controls Engineer, Autonomy Engineer
Electronics Engineer, CNC Machinist / Head of Prototyping
Office Manager
Cadre AI - 7 Open SD Roles
A cadre of four SD founders scaling an enterprise AI implementation firm.
Why they matter:
Cadre's team goes on-site to enterprise customers, builds the workflow automation and embeds with them until it's in production.
Their case studies show: 8,000 hours saved annually at one energy-solutions customer, 220 hours a month at a chemistry procurement platform, and a Loan Intelligence Assistant at a mortgage lender that took loan processing from days to minutes.
Engineering, solutions, and leadership seats are all open simultaneously, which tells you they're scaling every function of the firm in parallel.
Momentum signals:
Vertical playbooks across 8+ industries and 8+ enterprise departments
Content operation includes the AI 2030 Podcast, AI Leadership Workshops, and a PE AI Value Creation Playbook event series
Colombia nearshore engineering paired with SD in-office client-facing teams
Open roles:
Forward Deployed AI Engineer, AI Engineer, Senior AI Engineer
Technical AI Solutions Architect, Director of AI Solutions, VP of AI Strategy
Marketing Director
ExploreTech - 4 Open SD Roles
Software-driven critical mineral exploration built in San Diego.
Why they matter:
The electric future needs copper, lithium, and rare earths. And the U.S. currently has to import most of them.
ExploreTech's bet: modern software, data, and AI can find domestic deposits faster and cheaper than the standard drill-and-hope method the industry has run on for decades.
An analogy: it's like looking for a stud to hang a mirror on your wall without a stud finder. Hammer a nail, hope you hit it, try again, and again. Hope you find it before you have 9 holes to repair.
Their product is called Inverter & Driller. It runs on geophysical data to predict where a company should drill next.
A year ago, they were engaged by Giant Mining on the Majuba Hill copper project. Giant drilled hole MHB-36 into a low-resistivity anomaly ExploreTech predicted would contain copper mineralization. Nailed it.
Co-founded by Alex Miltenberger and Tyler Hall. A Stanford TomKat Center Innovation Transfer Grant seeded the company.
We spent time with the team recently.
Momentum signals:
Client wins with named public mining companies: Giant Mining, Reyna Silver, Prismo Metals, Honey Badger Silver
Field validation on Giant Mining's Majuba Hill hole MHB-36, where a drill result confirmed ExploreTech's software prediction of copper mineralization
Open roles:
Senior Software Engineer (in-person)
Geochemist (in-person)
Finance Lead (part-time or full-time, hybrid)
General Application
Also worth knowing
Two smaller SD companies worth having on your list:
UNIGRID - 1 open SD role. Sodium-ion battery company. Zero fire risk, 30,000+ cycles, operational from -40°C to 60°C.
Cedar - 2 open SD roles. Architectural design + computational engineering company revolutionizing how housing gets designed and built in American cities. Hiring a Senior Product Designer and a Software Engineer for Design Automation.
Still on the Radar
Three companies from last week still hiring and worth your time:
PSYONIC - 3 open SD roles. The Ability Hand built for amputees is going on ABB's factory robots.
Reaxiomatic - 8 open SD roles. Hermeus co-founder Skyler Shuford's new defense startup, moving into Brown Field in Otay Mesa.
Element Biosciences - 10 open SD roles. Just got ISO 13485 certified, unlocking clinical diagnostics for their AVITI Dx platform.
One pattern this week:
Three SD teams shipping software for real-world customers.
A driver-assist fleet with 20,000 users. AI implementations across 50+ enterprises. A drill result validating exploration software at Giant Mining.
Let's help good people find great San Diego teams.
Jonah 🐺
