Vetted Research Assistants in the Los Angeles Metro

“Built and deployed real-world systems end-to-end across security and healthcare contexts: led a 3-person team delivering a university vehicle tracking system with 30% cost savings and 1-year post-launch monitoring. Also implemented a healthcare RAG chatbot with adaptive query routing that cut LLM costs by 40% while maintaining answer accuracy, and has experience debugging non-deterministic LLM behavior in DevOps pipeline automation.”

“New grad who shipped an LLM-powered writing app (“Write-it”) to production on Azure with CI/CD (GitHub Actions + JFrog) and implemented an unconventional RAG pipeline to prevent repetitive prompts using embeddings and cosine similarity. Also participated in a Luma AI image/video generation hackathon, iterating with artist feedback and improving usability by rewriting non-technical prompts via an LLM.”

Ekta Mulkalwar

Screened

Junior Machine Learning & Full-Stack Engineer specializing in applied AI systems

Los Angeles, CA2y exp

“Master’s thesis focused on building and deploying a gait-based biometric authentication system using mobile accelerometer time-series data as an alternative to passwords/2FA. Emphasized real-world robustness by addressing sensor noise and variability (phone placement, walking speed, footwear) and improving safety using biometric metrics like FAR/FRR and EER, while collaborating closely with a non-ML thesis advisor.”

Hitha Sunkara

Screened

Junior Full-Stack Developer specializing in web apps and machine learning

Long Beach, CA3y exp

“Built and organized SQL databases for a grocery pricing update backend and has hands-on experience designing FastAPI/Python APIs with security controls like authentication, RBAC, and strict validation. Also brings research experience identifying real-world failure modes (weather-driven sensor/model inaccuracies in MSE wall corrosion work) and adapting models to improve robustness, plus UI design support on an email-restricted campus hackathon enrollment flow.”