Shad Laws
Senior Distinguished Engineer General Motors at Cruise
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolShad Laws is a Senior Distinguished Engineer at General Motors’ Cruise, bringing 14+ years of experience at the intersection of vehicle controls, robotics, and product strategy to build production-grade autonomy. He has led L4 programs from concept to prototype and deployment—most notably Peloton’s AutoFollow platooning and Renault’s Silicon Valley autonomy efforts—combining deep control/mechatronics expertise with design-thinking-driven product roadmaps. A Stanford Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, he pairs theoretical simulation and full-scale prototyping experience with entrepreneurial stints as a CTO and co-founder, enabling pragmatic technical leadership across OEMs and Tier 1 partners. At Cruise he now leads embodied-AI efforts to evolve planning and control stacks, while continuing hands-on contributions to open-source back-end tooling such as Gallery3 enhancements. Fluent across research, startup execution, and corporate program management, he’s as comfortable sketching HMI concepts as he is tuning vehicle dynamics at the handling limits. Outside work he channels his engineering curiosity into photography, jazz, cycling, and open-source coding—reflecting a maker’s mindset that informs his systems-level thinking.
13 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Mechanical Engineering, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Mechanical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University
English, French
Github Skills (4)
php10
back-end-development10
html8
database-management7
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
gallery/gallery3
Dec 2012 - Sep 2013
The simplest, most intuitive way to host your photos on your website.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1338 commits in 9 months
Contributions summary:Shad primarily focused on improving the Gallery3 application's functionality by enhancing its movie handling capabilities. They refactored code to use helper functions for file type and movie metadata retrieval, improving code maintainability and robustness. Furthermore, they added features to make thumbnail generation more flexible, allowing for customizable frame extraction times and integration with other modules. These changes involved modifications to the movie and legal_file helpers, item model, and various views, demonstrating a focus on backend improvements and extending the application's core features.
hostphoto-gallerysimplestintuitivegallery
gallery/gallery3-vendor
Feb 2013 - Sep 2013
Contributions:86 commits in 6 months
vendorpartyin-gallery3rd-partygallery
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