Vetted Research Assistants in California

“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).”

“Analytics professional with experience spanning HSBC and the University of Buffalo, combining banking risk/portfolio analytics with reproducible Python and SQL reporting workflows. Stands out for cleaning complex multi-source data, standardizing business metrics across dashboards, and delivering measurable impact including an 80% reduction in manual reporting and an estimated GBP 1.2M profit contribution from scorecard redevelopment.”

“Internship experience building production-oriented AI systems, including a real-time voice scam/spoof detector (RawNet + AASIST) hardened for noisy audio via aggressive augmentation and Zoom-based noise simulation, evaluated with EER on clean and wild datasets. Also built an LLM-driven UI automation agent using Playwright for apps like Linear/Notion with modular tool design, unit tests, and replayable scripted scenarios, and has AWS Step Functions experience orchestrating Lambda/Cognito workflows.”

Karan Variyambat

Screened

Mid-level Machine Learning Engineer/Researcher specializing in computer vision and multimodal AI

San Diego, CA3y exp

“Developed a production wildfire smoke detection system where smoke is visually subtle and easily confused with fog/clouds; addressed this with a hybrid CNN+LSTM+ViT model and multimodal weather features to reduce false positives. Experienced running scalable, reproducible ML pipelines on shared GPU infrastructure using Slurm and Kubernetes-style batch jobs with checkpointing, retries, and rigorous error analysis.”

“UCLA RoMeLa research assistant (since Oct 2025) building an embedded control and sensor-data platform for multi-robot coordination in a simulated warehouse. Deep hands-on experience with ROS on NVIDIA Jetson under RTOS constraints, secure MQTT/TLS telemetry, and SLAM performance optimization (including ORB-SLAM3) validated in Gazebo and deployed via Docker/Kubernetes and CI/CD.”

Utkarsh Mittal

Screened

Intern Data Scientist specializing in computer vision and LLM agents

Sunnyvale, CA0y exp

“Software engineering candidate with hands-on experience building and shipping LLM agents: created a production AI enrichment/coding agent at Covalent Metrology using Apollo.io + OpenAI, and built a Mistral hackathon router that dynamically selects among models to reduce token cost while maintaining quality. Also developed a real-time financial margin analysis agent that emails actionable insights and iterated on reliability issues (e.g., fixing misrouted emails, improving news relevance filtering).”

Suloni Praveen

Screened

Entry-Level Software Engineer specializing in data engineering and ML systems

Los Angeles, CA0y exp

“Built an end-to-end Next.js/TypeScript LLM-based scientific PDF analyzer using local Ollama/Llama inference to prioritize privacy and cost, producing structured research artifacts (e.g., authors/methods/findings) with ~92% extraction accuracy. At Qualtrics, helped replace a batch pipeline with a real-time, low-latency ML inference service (Python/Go on Kubernetes) using Redis caching, Grafana-based observability, and graceful fallbacks to protect UX during failures.”

“Head of Robotics at Orbital Composites who built the full ROS-based software stack ("OrbOS") for multi-robot KUKA-arm 3D printing of carbon-fiber composite geometries. Deep in motion planning and real-time control—created a pipeline to turn underconstrained toolpaths into optimal joint trajectories at massive command scale, plus redundant safety gatekeeping and a 250Hz synchronized robot+extruder controller. Has operated in a technical-founder capacity for ~6 years and values an engineering culture of openness, honesty, accountability, and high ownership.”

Anishkumar Mahalingam Iyer

Screened

Intern Software Engineer specializing in AI/ML infrastructure and applied machine learning

Palo Alto, CA2y exp

“Interned at Rivian where they built and deployed a production Whisper-based ASR + LLM real-time event labeling pipeline to help autonomous-vehicle engineers diagnose failures and route issues to triage teams. Also built a stateful multi-agent "Code Partner" developer assistant using LangGraph/LangChain (planner/router/coder/critique/tester) with evaluation, adversarial testing, and stakeholder-friendly communication practices.”

Atyab Hakeem

Screened

Junior Data Scientist / ML Engineer specializing in GenAI and computer vision

San Francisco, CA2y exp

“Software engineer who built and deployed OddPulse, a multi-agent LLM-powered continuous financial auditing system aimed at reducing compliance penalties by catching issues before audit cycles. Experienced with TrueAI-based agent orchestration, Airflow on GCP batch workflows, and rigorous evaluation/benchmarking (hit rate/MRR, latency/TTFT, cost) alongside security controls for sensitive financial data.”

Krishna Kodur

Screened

Mid-level Robotics & AI Researcher specializing in human-robot interaction and reinforcement learning

Santa Clara, CA8y exp

“Robotics software engineer who built an end-to-end mobile manipulation platform (Franka Panda on a Clearpath Ridgeback) for a simulated-kitchen human-robot interaction study with natural speech commands, implemented in Python/ROS. Has hands-on experience integrating diverse sensors (RealSense, LiDAR, biosignals) with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, Hugging Face) and fine-tuning GPT-Neo, plus simulation (Gazebo) and modern deployment practices (Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD).”

“Revamped a university academic calendar system into a Python-based calendar generation service, turning a weeks-long manual scheduling workflow into software that generates dozens of valid calendar combinations in under a minute. Also contributed to an Amazon search ML classifier by introducing precision/recall evaluation to better surface critical failure modes and improve prediction quality.”