Vetted Research Assistants in the DMV

Daniel Berhane Araya

Screened

Senior AI/ML Engineer specializing in production-grade LLM systems for regulated finance

Fairfax, VA9y exp

“AI/LLM engineer with published work who built FinVet, a production financial misinformation detection system using multi-pipeline RAG, confidence-based voting, and evidence-backed outputs (F1 0.85, +37% vs baseline). Also built NexusForest-MCP, a Dockerized Model Context Protocol server exposing structured global deforestation/carbon data via SQL tools for reliable LLM tool use. Previously delivered borrower risk-rating (PD) models at BMO Financial Group that were validated and integrated into an enterprise credit system through close collaboration with credit officers and portfolio managers.”

“Internship project at Builder Market: built an end-to-end production multimodal LLM application that estimates renovation/replacement costs from appliance photos (CLIP embeddings) or text descriptions, combining fine-tuning with agentic RAG. Focused heavily on real-world performance constraints—latency and cost—using parallel agent workflows, model routing to smaller/open-source models, re-ranking, and retrieval chunking, and collaborated closely with CEO/co-founders to deliver the solution.”

Akhil Bharadwaj Mateti

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in Data Science and Machine Learning

Arlington, Virginia4y exp

“Robotics/AV perception engineer who built a semantic-segmentation road detection system and integrated it into a ROS-based real-time pipeline (ROS bag camera feed to live monitor) achieving ~12 FPS. Strong in practical deployment work: solved multi-library versioning issues (ROS/OpenCV/TensorFlow), containerized the stack with Docker, and optimized inference by shifting runtime to C++ for large latency gains on NVIDIA hardware.”

Alban Delamarre

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Senior Unity Developer specializing in AI-driven gameplay and VR systems

Washington, DC10y exp

“Unity/C# developer focused on mission-driven interactive products spanning mobile, VR, and AI-powered learning experiences. They have shipped educational and healthcare simulations, including a grocery-skills game for autistic users with 10k+ users and VR nurse-training/de-escalation scenarios, while also building LLM-driven avatar systems for career exploration and mock interviews.”

“Robotics software engineer with hands-on ROS (ROS 1) experience building sensor-processing and state-based control pipelines in Python/C++. Demonstrated measurable reliability and performance gains in autonomous navigation—cut runtime failures by 30%, reduced replanning by 35%, and improved debugging efficiency by 40%—using timing-aware state machines, message/interface discipline, and simulation/testing with Gazebo, rosbag, Docker, and CI/CD.”