Who is Applied Intuition? Our Humans of Applied Intuition blog series aims to answer that question by diving deeper into what we do, what we like, and where we want to go. We want you to learn more about some of the most unique parts of our culture: the reasons we came to Applied Intuition and the reasons we stay.
If Mountain View is the heart of Applied Intuition, our global offices are our lifeblood. The automotive industry is inherently international, and with customers based far from Silicon Valley, our global locations aren’t just a home-away-from-home for our team—they’re launchpads for building deep relationships with our customers.
Engineers based in Mountain View often rotate out to our global offices via the company's Global Rotation Program and are welcomed by our thriving local teams. In Munich, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Tokyo, Seoul, Washington D.C., and Ann Arbor, Applied Intuition has a growing team of local application engineers, software engineers, recruiters, and salespeople. These offices aren’t remote satellite locations without a say in company growth and decisions; they are foundational for our current engagements and integral to our future vision.
I sat down with a few members of our EMEA, APAC, and DC teams to learn more about the ins and outs of our global offices. Meet Saransh Saxena, Hiro Yamauchi, Willem Laumen, Michal Harari, and Shigeyuki Iwata.
Who are you? What do you do at Applied Intuition, and how long have you been here?
Saransh: I’ve been on the Application Engineering team based out of Munich for the past year and a half. I work with a variety of our products and customers, mainly focused on enabling different customer workflows with our toolchain.
Willem: I'm an Application Engineer based in Munich and I lead the EMEA operations for our engagements with several of our tooling customers alongside their development and testing teams. Previously, I worked for Tesla and Bosch, and also spent time at an early stage startup in the automation space as a software engineer.
Michal: I’m a Solutions Manager on our Government team, overseeing all our delivery and execution on government projects. I’ve been at the company a year and a half and I work full-time out of the DC office. After starting my career in the military, I worked at Palantir for several years focused on national security and global health projects before I joined Applied Intuition.
Hiro: I joined Applied Intuition in 2019 as the first employee in the Japan office—I was also the first international employee! Before that, I worked for a mapping company that provided data for major automotive companies. I didn’t have any plans to change jobs—I had been with my previous company for over 20 years. But I had the opportunity to spend time in California from 2007 to 2014, during which time I was introduced to one of our co-founders, Qasar, and the rest is history.
Shige: I'm an Application Engineering manager based in Japan leading the local automotive team. I joined about a year and a half ago and was actually referred by Hiro! I had been in the market for new challenges, and I could see that Hiro was excited about Applied Intuition’s mission and growth.
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Why did the company open your offices?
Saransh: We started operations in Germany in late 2020, early 2021. The motivation was clear: Germany has a large automotive market with many automotive OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and Tier 1 suppliers. Our objective was to support them “in timezone.” The team had begun laying the groundwork a few years prior, and we’ve been in our current office since 2022, which is when I joined.
Hiro: The reason that our co-founders, Qasar and Peter, were looking for someone in Japan in 2019 was that they had just kicked off a proof of concept (POC) with a Japanese OEM, and they needed local support for those activities. That was me!
Michal: The DC office started shortly after the government team was established in 2022. DC is the seat of government in the US, so having a presence here is invaluable. This is the home base for our Government Affairs team since they’re always on Capitol Hill, meeting with staffers and members of Congress.
What's next for your offices?
Michal: There are about 20 of us, mostly on the government team with some support functions from infra, IT, and legal that also primarily assist government work. The office is planning to grow as our government projects grow, especially right now.
Saransh: When I joined in 2022, there were just a handful of people here in Munich. Both our customer engagements and our employees have expanded in number—the office is now almost 30! We're constantly in growth mode. In terms of culture, it's relaxed—but the work is not. Compared to the Mountain View offices, it's definitely quieter here (with more space between desks!) but just as energetic and fast-paced.
Willem: When Saransh and I first joined, our coffee machine was in the washroom because we didn’t have a kitchen. (Thankfully no longer the case!) Nowadays, when Mountain View engineers rotate to Munich, it can be difficult to find them a permanent desk for their stay because we’re outgrowing our office—a positive sign. The Munich office also serves as a hub for our engineering teams, allowing them to support customers in the same time zone. Teams use Munich as a base and travel to customers from here, which is typically much quicker than flying from North America. We’ve also set up a Stuttgart office to support other regional customers.
Shige: We’re now over 30 here in the Japan office. There has been a noticeable shift in our team composition as well. Initially, we had more engineers coming from larger tech companies, bringing extensive software expertise. However, as we’ve been expanding our business with automotive customers, we've started to hire more people from the automotive sector. This shift reflects our growing focus on building stronger connections within the automotive space.
Hiro: What really impresses me is that the core company culture hasn’t changed despite this growth. Many people worry that as a company expands, the culture or atmosphere might shift negatively, but I’ve seen how management has dealt with our growth well.
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How connected are you to Mountain View HQ?
Willem: Going onsite to customers alongside engineers from Mountain View really helps maintain connections—and this happens frequently! Another big help is visiting Mountain View regularly. Before you make the trip to headquarters for the first time, you're just a square profile picture on Slack, and people don’t really know you. It’s necessary to make those trips and, when you do, to expand those connections and friendships.
Saransh: On a daily basis, I’m well-connected with the product teams I work most closely with. But most of us fly out to Mountain View for a few days during onboarding, where you get the chance to connect with many others. We also have engineers from Mountain View who rotate out to Munich. Communication is very open—you know who’s working on what. Thanks to the open communication policy, we don't feel disconnected. Also, we can’t forget that we have our own office culture here in EMEA.
Shige: Applied Intuition’s strength is its openness. Outside of our weekly All Hands and other unofficial ways the international offices stay in communication with Mountain View, my senior manager, Rohan Pai (Head of Application Engineering) visits Japan frequently. When we have customer meetings, engineers and management fly to Japan to meet in person. We not only have a solid understanding of what’s going on in Mountain View, we’re also able to bring parts of their culture over to Japan, where it mixes with our culture.
What is it like to work with customers onsite?
Willem: During the Validation Toolset integration for one of our largest tooling customers, I flew to Israel with a team of engineers and created the entire validation data model and the corresponding product features for a week before the demo. That was a lot of fun—we were in a shared Airbnb working late into the night to make sure everything was up to scratch. It felt like friends grinding out a school project or studying for an exam together. It was a great experience performing under pressure and really showed me how close and efficient the team can be.
Hiro: One of our customers once expressed to me that it was an honor to work with such a “Top Gun” software team. It felt really rewarding to receive such high praise from them. They recognized Applied Intuition's expertise, professionalism, and pedigree. I love the phrase “Top Gun” team—it highlights the level of skill and commitment we bring to our work.
What changes when you’re on the ground working with customers daily?
Saransh: In-person interactions are always better because you get a sense of people’s personalities and little mannerisms. The preference is to establish relationships with the people you’ll be working with regularly, so meeting them in person a few times is essential. Most of the people we work with on the customer side, we regularly meet in person. This makes it easier not only to share insights or concerns about projects, but also to chat about non-work topics—it’s a positive feedback loop.
Willem: It’s not just preferred to go onsite to a customer, it’s absolutely necessary. If you only work remotely with customers, you miss out on small learnings that are ultimately very impactful (similar to how we may miss out on updates from Mountain View if we don’t visit).
Shige: Our approach has always been to understand the customer's pain points before proposing our solution, rather than pushing a product and saying, "Here, use this." It takes time to build trust and develop a closer relationship where customers feel comfortable sharing their concerns. What we've realized is that by not just trying to sell the product, but by sharing best practices, industry trends from Silicon Valley, and our team's expertise, we can break down those barriers. Over time, this openness grows.
What would you say to people looking to join one of your offices?
Willem: I frequently get asked whether the Munich office is just a satellite location disconnected from day-to-day engineering work. It’s certainly not the case. Applied Intuition employees, whether based here or in Mountain View, are deeply embedded in the company’s development. Employees who work out of our international offices are the voice of the customer. They’re not just relaying solutions and prices; they play a crucial role in shaping the future of customer engagements.
Saransh: We’re diversifying the roles in the Munich office, bringing in more software engineers, application engineers, and strategists. The expansion will enable us to better support our EMEA customers while ensuring that the Munich office develops its own identity attuned to customer needs in this region. There’s much more to our operations than sales and business development.
Michal: Everyone on the DC team is deeply passionate and committed to the mission we're working on. We take the impact we can have on our soldiers and U.S. national security very seriously. Many of us come from military or government backgrounds ourselves. We're truly driven by the possibilities of our work.
Shige: At Applied Intuition, it's important to be self-motivated, optimistic, and flexible. You get the opportunity to proactively exchange ideas with the Mountain View team and come to decisions as individual contributors without waiting on management to make the call. Customers and potential employees alike who are local to this region tend to appreciate this way of working because it’s fresh and unique.
Hiro: The automotive industry is undergoing significant changes, and I believe Applied Intuition is positioned right at the center of this transformation. For anyone interested in working at the forefront of such a dynamic shift, this would be an incredibly rewarding and beneficial opportunity.
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