Inside Plus: Juan Hernandez, Operations Manager

Juan Hernandez joined Plus in 2018 as a Vehicle Operations Specialist and, through his six years at the company, has received several promotions. He is now an Operations Manager.

Prior to Plus, he worked on the operations team at another autonomous vehicle company.

What sparked your interest in Plus six years ago and generally in autonomous vehicles?

I have always been fascinated by the autonomous vehicle industry. I liked the flexibility of Plus’s technology, and that its autonomous driving system served both trucks and passenger vehicles. I also appreciated the company’s global outlook which made sense to me. Joining Plus provided a great opportunity for me to grow professionally and learn from industry leaders.

Describe your role at Plus.

I schedule and supervise all tests for both trucks and passenger vehicles, including testing locally, at closed courses, and across state lines. I am the liaison between the operations and engineering teams. I get the test assignment requests from engineers, determine the specific needs of each test, and identify the individuals capable of executing those tests. During cross-country trips and closed-course testing, I also provide assistance to the Vehicle Ops team members and help with any troubleshooting needs.

I also work with the rest of the Operations management team to identify regulations and laws in the different regions where our vehicles are testing.

A part of your role has required you to assist drivers from the passenger side of the truck. From that vantage point, how would you describe the experience of being in a Plus truck?

I had the opportunity to give six or seven drivers from different trucking companies a chance to drive one of our trucks equipped with PlusDrive, which is our driver-supervised automated driving software. (We released a video about it here.) After thirty minutes of training, they were able to use the autonomous system very easily. It was great to hear their reactions: how comfortable and happy they felt using the technology.

Since joining the company I’ve traveled at least 100,000 miles in Plus trucks. I’ve been all over the country, driven from the East to West coast multiple times, and experienced our vehicles testing in various weather conditions from the intense heat in Phoenix to snowy and rainy conditions in the Northeast.

Six years is a pretty long time by Silicon Valley standards. What has kept you at Plus for this long?

What I really value here is the close collaboration between operations and engineering. The expertise of our ops team is always appreciated. The seamless communication between our ops team members and engineers and collective effort in addressing feedback on the system performance during testing has been a big part of why I’ve stayed.

What are you most proud of in your time at Plus?

I take great pride in directly contributing to the development of the autonomous system and the company as a whole. Over time I’ve also gained a lot of knowledge in this industry. I’ve been promoted several times, most recently in Janurary 2024, and have been able to use my bachelors degree in Business Administration and Management to learn and grow in the company. Having assumed various roles has motivated me to pursue a MBA with the goal to learn more and be able to contribute more at Plus.

It is tremendously rewarding to witness and contribute to the progress we have made in the last six years.

What do you enjoy doing in your downtime?

At Plus, I’m surrounded by super smart AI engineers, so I have been inspired to want to keep learning. I study a lot in my free time. I have taken various classes to further my understanding of the technology discussed by the engineers. I like diving more deeply into hardware and software troubleshooting. Our company covers part of the expenses for the classes, which is another great benefit.

I have completed multiple certificates, from different programming languages, to general computer science, and project management. Additionally, I’m close to completing a MBA program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I have been able to utilize the learnings from these in different aspects of my job, such as improving communication with the various teams in the company, tracking OKRs, process improvement, organizing our fleet more efficiently, and managing team members better.