Simon Fürst studied Aerospace Engineering at the Technical University of Munich. From 1993 till 2001 he was a research assistant at the institute of System Dynamics and Flight Mechanics at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich. His research area was on onboard autonomous, vision based systems for navigation and landing of airplanes and helicopters.
From 2001 till 2002 he worked for IABG in Ottobrunn as a project leader and consultant for the qualification of the high risk avionics software in the tiger helicopter and the Eurofighter Typhoon.
Since mid 2003 he is with BMW. There he is one of the authors of an internal software development standard for embedded software. From 2005 till March 2009 he was a member of the software group of the VDA NAA AA-I3 AK16 and a software expert in ISO TC22 SC3 WG16 working on ISO 26262, the functional safety standard for the automotive domain. During that time he was international project leader for some of the chapters of ISO 26262. In 2006 Fürst became BMW Project Leader for AUTOSAR. In 2008 he switched to the AUTOSAR Steering Committee. From July 2009 till March 2010 and from July 2015 till March 2016 he was AUTOSAR Spokesperson. Till March 2017 he was general manager for software development and software infrastructure being responsible for the AUTOSAR series roll-out at BMW. Since April 2017 he is general manager for machine learning, reasoning and knowledge representation focusing on highly automated and autonomous driving. From October 2017 the section being responsible for automated driving and driver assistant systems adapted its organization to agile principles. Since then Fürst is a line manager for the development of software based features. Since October 2019 he is principal experte for automated driving technologies. In December 2020 he was nominated convener of the newly started ISO TC22/SC32/WG13 “Safety and cybersecurity for automated driving”.