Vetted Education Professionals in North Carolina

“Startup and corporate venture builder with board/advisor/consulting experience across media-tech and automotive ventures, including helping launch NASCAR’s production and content creation arm as a standalone subsidiary. Has worked with 360° camera/content companies and AI-driven robotic camera/workflow products, and also built an entrepreneurship major track for a business school; seeks CEO role within a venture studio while taking a disciplined approach to personal financial risk.”

Samuel Ehrenstein

Screened

Mid-level Computer Vision & ML Researcher specializing in medical imaging and 3D vision

Chapel Hill, NC4y exp

“PhD (CS) candidate with hands-on autonomy and robotics experience: improved safety-critical behavior for Kodiak’s self-driving 18-wheeler trucks, increasing overtaking clearance by ~2 feet and reducing safety alerts. Also debugged a C++ SLAM system for 3D colon reconstruction and built a low-budget distributed simulation cluster using Linux, Docker, and Python, plus implemented multi-hop SSH-based comms for an underwater robotics competition minibot.”

“Backend engineer with experience at Razorpay and Groww, focused on hardening high-throughput financial systems for reliability and low tail latency through incremental improvements (SQL/index tuning, Redis caching, timeouts, idempotency). Also built/refactored a commodity risk tracker using Supabase Auth + Postgres RLS for strict per-user isolation, with a strong emphasis on API contracts, observability, and safe migrations.”

“Robotics software engineer focused on ROS 2 localization/SLAM: built a particle-filter (Monte Carlo) localization system in Python with likelihood-field modeling to handle noisy LiDAR and dynamic environments. Strong in debugging ROS 2 integration issues (tf2 frame sync, DDS/QoS message reliability) and in profiling/optimizing pipelines to reach real-time performance (~10 Hz) using precomputation and KD-trees.”

“NCAA coach (20+ years, non-hockey sport) pivoting into hockey advising/agency work, bringing deep recruiting and talent-identification experience including scholarship negotiation and helping athletes secure pro opportunities and transfers. Uses a data-driven evaluation model (on-ice metrics, wearables, video) and emphasizes trust-based relationship building with families and decision-makers.”

“Built and owned VividCraft end-to-end, a production AI platform spanning a TypeScript/Next.js frontend and a Python backend with FastAPI, Celery, Redis, PostgreSQL, and AWS. Stands out for reliability-focused systems thinking: designed idempotent job orchestration across 9 AI providers, shipped with extensive automated test coverage, and reports zero production regressions after launch plus zero credit loss through provider outages.”

Negasa Yahi

Screened

Mid-level Robotics & Controls Engineer specializing in autonomous vehicle motion planning

Greensboro, NC9y exp

“Robotics software engineer focused on UAV multi-agent collision avoidance, combining Behavior Trees with MPC and validating in a ROS-based simulator via PX4 hardware-in-the-loop. Has hands-on experience debugging real-time estimation/control issues (EKF noise/arming failures), building distributed ROS service architectures, and smoothing MPC trajectories to meet kinematic and FAA right-of-way constraints.”