Around 750 of the 3,000 new hires the luxury carmaker plans to bring in globally to develop the operating system were hired in Sindelfingen, working on features from in-vehicle entertainment to autonomous driving.
The centre is part of a wider effort by Mercedes-Benz to streamline its software strategy from a patchwork approach bringing in technology from a wide range of suppliers, to controlling the core of its software offering itself.
"We take responsibility for software architecture and integration – that is our main goal," chief software officer Magnus Oestberg said in a roundtable.
"We don’t do everything ourselves – we place value on partnerships, but of course the parts that are most important for us, we do in-house."
One such partnership is with US computer graphics specialist Nvidia, with whom Mercedes-Benz struck a deal in 2020 to develop assisted and self-driving functions which will form part of the MB.OS system launching in two years time.
The carmaker is 600 unfilled vacancies away from achieving its goal of a global team of 10,000 software engineers in Berlin, China, India, Israel, Japan, and the United States.
"The profile of a software engineer is highly sought-after - demand is considerably higher than supply," Chief Technology Officer Markus Schaefer said.
In a survey of 572 auto executives by research institute Capgemini, 97% said that four out of 10 in-house workers will need to have software skills within five years, from IT architects to cloud management professionals to cybersecurity experts.
