Pittsburgh’s Self-Driving Car Boom Means $200,000 Pay Packages for Robotics Grads

There’s a war for talent in Pittsburgh’s booming autonomous car market.

It started with Uber and now includes Argo AI, which is majority owned by Ford, and a start-up called Aurora Innovation. With so much hiring, it’s a good time to be at the city’s prized academic institution, Carnegie Mellon University.

Andrew Moore, the dean of Carnegie Mellon’s computer science school, said that computer vision graduates right out of college are commanding pay packages of $200,000, which he described as “unheard of for any role until recently.” In addition to Uber, Argo and Aurora, Moore said there’s a fourth self-driving car company in Pittsburgh that’s not yet talking publicly.