Zhu has been at Google as the self-driving team’s principal software engineer for most of his career, after a brief internship at Intel in 2005. Ferguson, on the other hand, joined Google in 2011 as the principal computer-vision and machine-learning engineer on the self-driving project and started his career at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. (Carnegie Mellon, of course, has been at the forefront of autonomous car innovation and home to Uber’s research and development lab in the area.)