Stellantis CTO Ned Curic: Make yourself redundant, even as we hire

Curic's advice sits alongside a hiring plan, not instead of one. He told Bloomberg at the Paris auto show in October that Stellantis would add "multiple hundreds" of engineers in Europe and the U.S. this year, so the redundancy message is about how engineers work rather than a signal of fewer jobs.

His tenure has already reshaped how Stellantis builds software. Joydip Saha, who manages the hands-free driving project, said his team built the Cherokee's hands-free system in six weeks with AI tools, while a similar project used to take a year or 18 months. Ben Zawodni, a software engineering manager, recalled that a proof of concept for a global observability platform took a week with agentic coding tools, down from about six months, and that defects that took two to three weeks to fix shrank to two to three days.

Even so, the speed gains are not the same as Stellantis' larger financial problems. The company has 14 brands, a European business that is losing money, and a second-quarter adjusted operating margin of 1.8%, while CEO Antonio Filosa has set a 7% margin target for 2030. Curic described Stellantis as not yet where it needs to be as a whole organization, even as some teams show "phenomenal successes."