BYD has hired a former director from Volkswagen-backed technology firm Horizon Robotics to head its regional intelligent driving branch in Shanghai,??? ?? ???? as the Chinese electric vehicle giant ramps up its software and automated driving technology. When contacted by TechNode on Tuesday, a BYD spokesperson confirmed the news, which was first reported by local media publication AI-Drive. Liao Jie had been responsible for the deployment of the deep learning algorithms and architectures using Horizon Robotics’ Journey series processors at the firm for seven years before moving over to BYD recently. He has more than a decade of automated driving software experience including time spent with Baidu creating large amounts of autonomous driving datasets to improve the search engine firm’s self-driving system between 2011 and 2016. Shenzhen-headquartered BYD recently hired over 4,000 software engineers after establishing an intelligent driving research division in Shanghai last year, according to a May 17 report by Reuters. [AI-Drive, in Chinese]