Vetted Research Assistants in California

Akashleena Sarkar

Screened

Junior Software Engineer specializing in robotics and real-time distributed systems

Mountain View, CA2y exp

“Robotics software engineer focused on low-compute navigation/SLAM: built a 6-DOF SLAM validation pipeline (IMU + 2D LiDAR + ultrasonic) producing ~1cm OctoMap accuracy and deployed it on an Intel Atom by optimizing particle-filter SLAM with a greedy max-likelihood update. Deep ROS 2 experience (executors, composable/lifecycle nodes, QoS, timestamping) plus simulation and deployment tooling (Gazebo C++ plugins, Docker, CI/CD, ROS 2 build farm) and drone navigation work with MAVROS/PX4.”

“Robotics software engineer who built the full control stack for a fleet of manufacturing/repair robots in Relativity Space R&D (perception, planning, motion control, integration, deployment). Has ROS/ROS 2 experience spanning custom SLAM (LiDAR+IMU), multi-robot coordination, and multi-drone control (Pixhawk 4, minimum-snap trajectories), with strong real-world debugging and simulation/CI testing practices (Gazebo, CI/CD, some Docker).”

Ho-Wei Lu

Screened

Junior Robotics Engineer specializing in motion planning and control

Berkeley, USA1y exp

“Robotics software engineer who built a ROS2-based ping-pong ball interception system on a 7-DOF Sawyer arm, spanning real-time vision, trajectory prediction, and an MPC joint-velocity controller to hit a flying ball within ~1 second. Demonstrated strong real-time debugging and systems integration skills (timestamp-based latency analysis, event-based redesign, ROS2 QoS tuning) and is currently working with Isaac Sim in Docker with GitHub-based CI/CD for assembly-task simulation.”

“Backend/ML systems engineer with experience at SDSC, UCSD, and Media.net, building production semantic dataset/model discovery using embeddings + Solr KNN and LLM-based intent/reranking at 5M+ dataset scale. Emphasizes offline/online separation for predictable serving, has delivered measurable gains (23% retrieval accuracy, 38% latency reduction) and helped secure a $3M+ NSF grant.”

“SDE who worked on an MGICS Lab robotics project building a multi-agent model to help agents understand tasks and generate robot instructions, emphasizing task-splitting, checking, and a reflection agent to improve accuracy. Also has experience using GitHub with automated CI/CD pipelines.”

“Backend/full-stack engineer building complex internal platforms and customer-facing demos at the intersection of infrastructure and product. Shipped a no-code Product Lifecycle Manager for manufacturing (3 manufacturers, 1000+ evolving tests) using AWS S3/SQS ingestion and extensible Postgres (EAV+JSONB) with end-to-end traceability. Also built a FastAPI-based company data intelligence platform with Okta-secured RBAC and an LLM/MCP layer for ChatGPT-like analytics over enterprise data sources.”

“Full-stack engineer who built an enterprise search platform (Codlens) delivering natural-language Q&A over Jira/Slack using embeddings, vector DB search, re-ranking (RRF), and LLM responses with source grounding. Also designed and benchmarked a distributed IAM system with Postgres transaction-log replication and Raft-based quorum consistency, reporting ~253 TPS at ~60ms latency in a multi-node setup. Experience spans early-stage startups (Zetic AI, Sagwara Capital) and large-scale orgs (Akamai, Atlassian).”

Ali Rahmati

Screened

Senior Machine Learning Engineer specializing in optimization, LLMs, and on-device AI

Santa Clara, CA9y exp

“Engineer with hands-on experience debugging and hardening a fixed-point implementation for an internal PoC, quickly diagnosing overflow/underflow issues that caused intermittent failures across thousands of runs and delivering a code fix. Comfortable presenting technical solutions with layered slide depth and doing follow-up deep dives for interested stakeholders, though has limited direct customer/sales partnership experience.”

Ibrahim Kurban Ozaslan

Screened

Junior Robotics & Controls Researcher specializing in optimization, MPC, and reinforcement learning

Los Angeles, CA

“Robotics software candidate who designed and implemented a hierarchical motion-planning and whole-body control pipeline for a 37-state Spot robot to traverse complex terrain, using Graph of Convex Sets for safe footstep selection plus optimization-based IK and nonlinear trajectory optimization for joint trajectories/contact forces. Strong in optimization-heavy robotics workflows (PyDrake, MATLAB/Simulink) and methodical debugging down to signal-level and numerical stability; has not used ROS/ROS2 yet.”

“Built and owned an end-to-end AV operations automation and dashboarding platform for USC event operations, used daily to coordinate hundreds of live events. Delivered a React/TypeScript full-stack system integrating Smartsheet APIs with strong reliability practices (typed contracts, validation/fallbacks, safe rollouts) and experience with queue-based microservice patterns (idempotency, retries, DLQs, monitoring).”

“Frontend/platform engineer with unusually strong depth in real-time data systems, observability, and API architecture across Adobe, Macy's/Bloomingdale's, and ASU. They’ve owned high-scale product surfaces end-to-end, from secure GraphQL/REST and WebSocket design through deployment, while also driving platform-wide standards adopted across 8+ product surfaces and 6 teams.”