Tesla Inc. has accused a former employee of pilfering trade secrets related to the technology that powers many of the company’s automated processes. 

In the complaint filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Tesla, the electric car and clean-energy company, alleged that three days after hiring Alex Khatilov on Dec. 28, the automation engineer began “stealing thousands of highly confidential software files from Tesla’s secure internal network, transferring them to his personal cloud storage account on Dropbox.”