Motivation
It’s been quite a while after I left the previous job, which made me focus on what I really wanted to do with my career. When the AI technology governing the word, like CNN & Supervised Learning. At first, the AI itself seems to be intriguing; understanding from the data, and make an algorithm. However, I was skeptical if they can be deployed into real device, then I ponder I need to understand the optimization, but that’s when I saw myself being employed into Self-Driving Vehicle Simulator, which was Unity Based and switched to Unreal Engine Later.
I think I was fortunate. While developing the simulator as a testbed—although it was built on top of the Unreal Engine client—I had the chance to work on various subsystems and gain experience with the Observer Pattern, event-driven architecture, multithreading, and network programming (TCP/IP, ROS Bridge). Thanks to all of that, I feel like I finally started walking the path I wanted as a software engineer. And eventually, by developing sensor simulation modules needed for autonomous vehicles (LiDAR, Camera, RADAR, etc.), I had the chance to work on performance optimizations with real-time and sync modes as well. Of course, since these were simulations, they didn’t perfectly match reality 100%, but they still helped me transition from the vision side into graphics.
Hyundai Autoever
Back then, Hyundai Autoever was a solid company as an affiliate of the major corporation Hyundai Motor Company, and I thought my skills would fit in pretty well. Even though the position I applied for was a bit far from automobiles—specifically, the Smart Factory Digital Twin Platform development team within the SDx division—I felt that the interviews went reasonably well. There were a few awkward moments, but I enjoyed the take-home assignment and the coding interview. Compared to Amazon, they seemed a bit less strict in their selection process, but looking back, it still had a fairly long and structured pipeline.
I won’t go into details about the assignment, but I liked that it felt like working with a real application. I also felt that the work could later expand into Inverse Kinematics (IK). I’m not a roboticist, but I’ve always been confident in my understanding of 3D graphics and mathematics, so I approached it with a good amount of confidence.
Looking back now, there were definitely some unexpected questions during the second executive interview, but I answered with confidence and did my best to express why I was a good fit for the company. And now that the final result was acceptance, I can say that quitting my previous job and going through that period of struggle ended up becoming an opportunity to reflect on my career and grow from it.
I left out some details, but this is a brief summary of my interview experience with Hyundai Autoever.
