Vetted Research Assistants in the Raleigh-Durham

Samuel Ehrenstein

Screened

Mid-level Computer Vision & ML Researcher specializing in medical imaging and 3D vision

Chapel Hill, NC4y exp

“PhD (CS) candidate with hands-on autonomy and robotics experience: improved safety-critical behavior for Kodiak’s self-driving 18-wheeler trucks, increasing overtaking clearance by ~2 feet and reducing safety alerts. Also debugged a C++ SLAM system for 3D colon reconstruction and built a low-budget distributed simulation cluster using Linux, Docker, and Python, plus implemented multi-hop SSH-based comms for an underwater robotics competition minibot.”

“Robotics software engineer focused on ROS 2 localization/SLAM: built a particle-filter (Monte Carlo) localization system in Python with likelihood-field modeling to handle noisy LiDAR and dynamic environments. Strong in debugging ROS 2 integration issues (tf2 frame sync, DDS/QoS message reliability) and in profiling/optimizing pipelines to reach real-time performance (~10 Hz) using precomputation and KD-trees.”

“Built and shipped a production LLM-powered decision system that replaced a slow, inconsistent manual review process by turning messy text into structured, auditable outputs behind an API. Demonstrates strong end-to-end ownership of reliability and operations (schema validation, retries/fallbacks, latency/cost controls, monitoring for drift) and a disciplined approach to evaluation and regression testing. Experienced collaborating with non-technical reviewers to define success criteria and deliver interpretable outputs that get adopted.”

Erick Ortega

Screened

Junior Embedded & Computer Vision Engineer specializing in Edge AI and QA automation

Raleigh, NC2y exp

“Built a Meta-style AI smart glasses system emphasizing on-device privacy and low-latency processing, spanning ESP32-S3/FreeRTOS firmware through an NVIDIA Jetson Linux edge-AI pipeline in Python/Docker. Strong in real-time streaming optimization (zero-copy GDMA, deterministic scheduling), encrypted transmission (AES-256), and reliability via stress testing and robust error handling; currently building CI/CD automation tests using Playwright and computer vision.”