Tesla has lost another long-time engineering veteran. Thomas Dmytryk, a director who played a foundational role in building the company’s over-the-air (OTA) infrastructure and the newly launched Robotaxi ride-hailing service, has officially announced his departure from Tesla.
Dmytryk leaves the company after an impressive 11 years. While his exact title for the past seven months was simply "Director," his previous role was Senior Software Engineering Manager.
From Niche to 10 Million
In a heartfelt farewell post on LinkedIn, Dmytryk reflected on just how drastically Tesla has scaled since he first joined the engineering team in early 2015 — back when Tesla only had the Model S and Model X.
"When I joined, Tesla was a niche luxury automaker with only 50K cars delivered and lots of ambitions," Dmytryk wrote. "My 5-person team owned OTA, connectivity, and commands running on a very simple stack. My ambitions at the time were simple: Automate everything. Pioneer software-defined vehicles. Modernize apps and infra."
Under his leadership, that original 5-person team expanded and scaled its architecture to support a fleet that is now rapidly approaching 10 million vehicles globally. If you have ever used your Tesla app to send a command to your car or downloaded an OTA software update, you have interacted directly with the infrastructure Dmytryk's team helped pioneer.
The Ride Hailing Moonshot
Perhaps Dmytryk's most significant contribution to Tesla’s current valuation came in the latter half of his tenure, when his team was tasked with building the software backbone for the Robotaxi network.
"Then came our moonshot: create ride-hailing capability and bring it to the world in a way that has never been seen before," he wrote. "Quickly, we evolved from proof of concept to a full-blown production-ready solution, bringing in more and more teams in the picture until we finally released it to the world."
His departure comes at a fascinating time, as the very ride-hailing network he helped build is currently expanding and calibrating its pricing model in early markets like Austin.
Retirement
Despite writing that Tesla's future is extremely bright and that Tesla is just getting started, Dmytryk noted that he is stepping away from the relentless pace of Tesla's engineering culture to focus on his family, rather than take up a new position elsewhere.
"Human life’s always been my North Star, right now I need to be with mines [sic]," he explained.
He closed his announcement by praising the tenacity, brilliance, and devotion of the frontline engineers at Tesla, stating that he will be cheering them on from the sidelines as they push Tesla even further into the world of AI and robotics.
