Samsung hires Waymo’s autonomous driving design head

YoonJung Ahn, a design head at Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous driving technology unit, is joining Samsung Electronics Co. as executive vice president to lead the design management center, Samsung said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday.

In 2012, she started her career at Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet and led the design for Waymo’s first self-driving car prototype, nicknamed Firefly, according to Automotive News.

It is the first car she ever designed and built without a steering wheel or brake pedals, according to the report. Thanks to its unconventional design, she and her team won Google a Red Dot design award in 2016.

She develops products “from concept to production,” according to her LinkedIn account.

Ahn, born in 1974, had led Motorola Mobility’s product design team during her stint at the US smartphone maker between 2006 and 2012 and also worked as a senior industrial designer at LG Electronics Inc. between 2001 and 2006.

Other new hires for Samsung’s senior positions include Mike (Chongkyu) Shin, a former technology leader at Veolia Environmental, a French company.

He now leads Samsung’s global manufacturing and infrastructure technology business as executive vice president after joining in September this year.

Shin previously worked at LG Chem Ltd. as a research fellow between 2016 and 2021 and earned a doctorate in chemistry from the Technical University of Munich.

Jonathan Lim, a former head of audience sales at Microsoft, recently took an executive position in the Mobile eXperience (MX) division at Samsung to head its business-to-business services. The division is in charge of the smartphone business. Lim is a 10-year veteran at Microsoft.

Jae-Woong Hyun, a former NAND flash technologist at Fusion-io, a subsidiary of SanDisk, recently returned to Samsung as vice president of the strategic marketing team for memory chips. He previously worked at Samsung as a senior researcher for memory chip development.

Write to Ik-Hwan Kim at lovepen@hankyung.com
 


Yeonhee Kim edited this article.