Troubled electric car maker Tesla Inc. has made an interesting new hire that could hint at moves by the company to license its technology to other electric and self-driving car makers.

Stuart Bowers, Snap Inc.’s vice president of monetization engineering, is joining Tesla as vice president of engineering to work on its Autopilot software and “other projects,” according to Reuters.

Bowers comes with a wealth of experience in terms of engineering, having worked at both Microsoft Corp. and Facebook Inc. in engineering and machine learning roles, according to his LinkedIn profile. He graduated from the University of Washington in 2007 with a bachelor of science in applied and computational mathematical sciences.

Where the hire becomes interesting is that he comes into the role having overseen “monetization engineering” at Snap. That role was primarily related to Snap’s efforts to increase revenue from its Snapchat app from a technical viewpoint, but it was nonetheless directly related to monetization.

Along with various inquiries into the safety of its vehicles, Tesla is also experiencing financial troubles, including a massive loss in November and reports that the company could run out of funds as soon as the end of the year.

In what could be simply a coincidence or directly related, Tesla, after five years of requests, finally released a portion of the open-source code it’s obligated to provide under the terms of the GNU General Public License, according to The Register.

So here’s what we have: Tesla hires an engineer that specializes in monetization at the same time it’s cleaning up compliance issues with the code base used in its technology.

SiliconANGLE put the question directly to a spokesperson for Tesla, asking whether the company has “any plans to start licensing Tesla tech to other companies.” The spokesperson neither denied nor confirmed the question, saying only that it had indeed hired Bowers.

Tesla has been unique in the self-driving technology market in that it has primarily kept its technology in-house while others such as Waymo, Uber Technologies Inc., Magna International Inc. and Didi Chuxing Technology Co. are all working with other partners across a broad scope including software, hardware and car makers.

With further problems with the long-delayed Model 3 reported only today, Tesla either entering into partnerships with other companies or licensing its technology, or both, makes a lot of sense.

Photo: Oregon Department of Transportation/ Wikimedia Commons