Mercedes-Benz has tapped former Amazon software development manager Mike Dosenbach to lead a new engineering center in downtown Seattle that could employ up to 150 software engineers by mid-2019.
The German automaker’s new engineering center, its sixth worldwide, will focus on cloud computing efforts, making sense of data collected from connected vehicles.
It marks the latest major company to establish a software engineering center in the Seattle area, joining companies such as eBay, Alibaba, Facebook and Airbnb.
GeekWire has been tracking the arrival of new engineering centers, a list that has now grown to more than 100 companies. Many of those companies — including Baidu, Huawei, Oracle and Stripe — are focused on cloud computing technologies.
Dosenbach spent nearly eight years at Amazon managing multiple engineering teams. He was most recently a senior engineering manager at Okta — another out-of-town tech company with an engineering office in the Seattle region — before joining Mercedes-Benz this past May.
“We will be building the next generation cloud-based back-end for all internet connected aspects of Mercedes-Benz cars,” Dosenbach noted in his LinkedIn profile, calling it “a unique and complex IoT problem,” referring to the idea of the Internet of Things or network of connected devices.
In a statement, Dosenbach said Mercedes-Benz is the first carmaker to open a “lab for cloud development in Seattle.” He said the company sees the new offices as “a long-term investment.”
Stuttgart, Germany-based Daimler AG, which owns Mercedes-Benz, also operates the car2go car-sharing service, which has grown to more than 750 vehicles in the Seattle area, its largest U.S. market. Last month, car2go announced that it was replacing its fleet of Smart Fortwo cars with larger Mercedes-Benz sedans and SUVs.
“Mercedes-Benz is constantly striving for best products and customer experiences world-wide, that means also delivering connected and intelligent solutions which are based on state-of-the-art technology — that, and the respective experts, is what we’ll find here in Seattle,” Sajjad Khan, head of digital vehicle & mobility at Daimler, said in a statement.
Seattle also is the headquarters of car sharing service ReachNow, which is owned by BMW.
The news was reported earlier this morning by The Seattle Times.
Editor’s note: This story was updated with information from Mercedes-Benz.
