Vetted Research Assistants in California

“Unreal Engine 5 gameplay/systems developer who led major core features for the Early Access Steam city builder Geopogo Cities: Windsor Detroit, including an end-to-end building placement system tightly integrated with economy, AI pedestrians (Mass AI/Zone Graph/State Trees), and procedural city block generation. Also built a third-person exploration layer with character customization, stamina, and animation retargeting on top of the City Sample Crowd framework, plus shipped player-driven UX improvements based on live Early Access feedback.”

“Founding member of Tausight, building AI systems to detect and protect PHI for healthcare organizations; helped take the company through post–Series A funding and exited after ~6 years. Drove a strategic collaboration with Intel’s OpenVINO team—becoming the first to deploy it in a real production system and improving model performance by ~30% on customer Intel-CPU machines.”

“Full-stack engineer and ML assistant in UC Irvine’s CS department who deployed a lab project showcase platform and integrated on-demand execution of computational projects using Docker for isolation. Also built and optimized Linux cloud/cluster test automation for research, diagnosing RAM and network sync bottlenecks, and later led development of a Python-based predictive analytics tool for musicians using probabilistic graphical models and flexible data pipelines.”

“Software engineer who owned an Order Management System end-to-end at Reliance Jio, improving large-table performance via UI virtualization shipped behind feature flags and refined through direct ops-user observation. Also built an OCR automation tool at Piramal Realty using Python/Tesseract with validation and manual correction fallbacks, driving adoption by operations teams. Experienced integrating with Kafka-based microservices and improving observability using structured logging and correlation IDs.”

“Backend engineer who significantly evolved an internal analytics/reporting platform (Python API + Postgres) powering self-service dashboards for product/business teams, focusing on reliability under heavy concurrent load and fast query performance. Demonstrates strong production engineering practices across API design (FastAPI), observability, incremental rollouts with feature flags, and data security using JWT/RBAC plus Postgres row-level security.”

“QA professional from fintech/SAP security and complex identity systems who has owned end-to-end testing across the SDLC, including being the sole QA on a high-risk payment platform carrier migration. Demonstrated strength in integration testing, data integrity validation, and diagnosing calculation/automation defects using controlled test data and scripted date emulation; experienced with JIRA/TestRail and Selenium-based regression coverage.”

“Built and shipped a production RAG system (“TROJAN KNOWLEDGE”) for answering questions over technical PDFs, using a 3-stage retrieval stack (BM25 + FAISS + cross-encoder) to lift F1 from 71% to 84%. Drove major performance gains with a 3-level cache (memory/Redis/disk) cutting latency from ~200ms to ~10ms, and added Prometheus/Grafana monitoring plus LangChain-based fallback logic to handle OpenAI rate limits under load.”

“Full-stack engineer (React/TypeScript + Bun/Node-like backend) who recently rebuilt a terminal-based chat UI, implementing custom Markdown lex/parse/render and a typewriter-style streaming renderer while optimizing React DOM growth for ~50% faster performance. Has startup experience making high-ownership decisions under ambiguity and rapidly integrating multiple external AI/tooling services (5–6 in a week) with fallback strategies for flaky dependencies.”