SHENZHEN-BASED technology company Tencent Holdings Ltd. is recruiting self-driving car engineers in Palo Alto, California of the United States, joining a crowded field of corporations vying for talent in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley is a hub for the testing and research of autonomous vehicles, with five dozen companies permitted to test such cars on California roads. But state records as of last month did not show Tencent had an autonomous vehicle testing permit.

“We are building a research team for our auto-drive team based in Palo Alto, California,” the company said in job advertisements on LinkedIn.

There are at least nine postings on LinkedIn for engineering positions in areas including motion planning, sensor fusion, vehicle intelligence and machine learning. The job postings date back between two weeks and a month, according to LinkedIn.

Tencent’s domestic rival Baidu Inc. was one of the first of the new generation of Chinese companies to set up a base in Silicon Valley in 2011. It has an autonomous vehicle testing permit in California.

According to Xinhua in May, Tencent got the green light by the Shenzhen city government to test self-driving cars on some public roads. (SD-Agencies)