Vetted Education Professionals in the Chicago Metro

hemant jha

Screened

Executive Design & Innovation Leader specializing in product, strategy, and sustainable systems

Chicago, Illinois25y exp

“Product/system designer focused on ultra-clean, modular, customizable work/organization environments (e.g., making stations for studios and fabrication spaces). Emphasizes rules-based interaction models, restrained structural visual language, and hands-on field research/prototyping to embed industrial constraints (tolerances, load paths, safety) into intuitive, training-free user experiences.”

“Early-career engineer (internship background) who built a production-style notes product using Next.js App Router with Server Components/Server Actions and a Postgres-backed analytics model. Demonstrates strong performance and reliability instincts—measured DB latency improvements via indexing and cursor pagination, plus durable orchestration with Temporal using idempotency and deterministic workflows.”

“Serial founder with experience across both bootstrapped and venture-backed startups, including scaling Aloa past $1M in first-year revenue and raising $1.3M for Bracketology, a fantasy gaming platform for reality TV now in sale process. Combines sales, marketing, product, automation, and AI implementation experience, with exposure to WeFunder, Newchip, and 1871 as both participant and mentor.”

Fatemeh Taghvaei

Screened

Junior AI/ML Engineer and Instructor specializing in deep learning, computer vision, and NLP

Chicago, IL2y exp

“Computer-vision practitioner and educator who built a real-time license plate recognition system (OpenCV/Python + KNN) optimized to run on a Raspberry Pi with camera integration. Also designs hands-on deep learning coursework, incorporating recent transformer-based vision research (Vision Transformers) into practical labs on real datasets.”

“Built and shipped LLM-enabled decision systems focused on real production reliability rather than chatbot demos, including a multimodal radiology retrieval platform with 28% relevance gains and 35% lower latency. Also architected a 4-agent employee analytics workflow with structured outputs, traceable orchestration, and strong safeguards for messy real-world data.”

Sujay Surendranath Pookkattuparambil

Screened

Mid-level Machine Learning Engineer specializing in computer vision and reinforcement learning

Chicago, IL3y exp

“Early-stage engineer with hands-on embedded prototyping experience (Arduino/Raspberry Pi) who helped build an award-winning smart glasses project enabling phone notifications via Bluetooth. Strong computer vision performance optimization background, including accelerating 120 FPS inference by moving from TensorFlow to PyTorch and deploying through ONNX + TensorRT quantization, plus Docker-based GPU deployment and CI/ML practices.”

“Robotics software engineer with ROS 2 Humble/Nav2 experience on a warehouse robot fleet, focused on improving throughput in dynamic human environments. Implemented C++ local-planner and velocity-control changes using LiDAR-based motion prediction and real-time costmap tuning under a 20ms control loop, and built a Gazebo digital twin with custom failure-injection plugins plus Docker/Kubernetes deployment tooling.”