SAN CARLOS, Calif., July 27, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Iron Ox, a farming innovation company with deep expertise in robotics and artificial intelligence, hired its first Director of Robotics this week as the company accelerates growth and expands its commercial footprint.
David Silver joins as the company’s first Director of Robotics after leadership roles at Waymo and Google, where he was a Technical Lead for self-driving cars. He previously held robotics research roles at The National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC), also related to autonomous vehicles. He holds a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon.
“We’re proud to bring David onto the team here at Iron Ox,” said Sarah Osentoski, SVP of Engineering at Iron Ox. “He brings a depth of practical and academic knowledge to our team, and he’s got a particular talent for leading teams to tackle and solve extremely difficult challenges in robotics.”
Building the bench
Silver was most recently a Tech Lead & Manager at Waymo, the self-driving car division of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, where he worked on autonomous vehicles from 2013 onwards.
“The work happening at Iron Ox is vitally important, and I’m genuinely excited about the potential impact this will have,” said Silver. “The challenge of having different robots work together is really engaging. It’s got everything: mobility, manipulation, computer vision, and a vast amount of machine learning potential. Bringing that all together to solve such an urgent, global problem as agriculture’s effects on climate is deeply motivating. The team here is great, and I can’t wait to get started with them.”
Hiring in hypergrowth
“Our ability to hire and retain the most inspiring people is essential to our future,” said Brandon Alexander, Iron Ox CEO. “We want Iron Ox to be the workplace that’s top-of-mind for people who want a meaningful role in making the global food system sustainable. We brought David on board to lead and scale up the robotics team, which he’ll start doing immediately. We’re extremely proud to welcome him to Iron Ox.”
About Iron Ox:
Iron Ox is a farming innovation company with deep expertise in robotics and artificial intelligence, and a vision to solve global climate through food. Their approach redesigns every step of the farming process, achieving levels of precision that are impossible through traditional farming. Iron Ox produce is both local and sustainable by design, greatly reducing systemic food waste and minimizing the ecological impact of farming. For more information, visit www.ironox.com.
