Vetted Research Assistants in the San Diego Metro

“Built and deployed an LLM-powered RAG system (PubChemRAG) for a 4D Mitospace project to compare mechanisms across a ~100-drug glossary and surface expected pathway/phenotypic differences in mitochondrial imaging. Worked closely with biochemistry and microscopy experts to design tiered evaluation benchmarks, iterating on prompts, retrieval quality (corpus hygiene, chunking strategy), and model outputs under GPU constraints using LangChain.”

“Backend engineer who built and evolved an internal multi-agent AI research platform (Electron + FastAPI) integrating OpenAI, focused on fast, reproducible experimentation with strong observability and run metadata for debugging. Has led incremental backend refactors with feature flags and parallel validation, and brings production-grade access control expertise from ServiceNow (table/field ACLs and row-level-style enforcement).”

“Robotics software engineer with a master’s focused in the field who has integrated a multi-sensor robotics fusion laser system (fault detection, PLC comms, PyTorch-based CV diagnostics, and an engineer-facing status front end) under NDA. Has ROS experience from the University of Michigan Autonomous Robotic Vehicle team using Nav2/SLAM Toolbox/Gmapping with RViz and ROS bag-driven debugging, plus Gazebo simulation work and upcoming drone path-planning optimization research.”

“Backend/ML systems engineer with experience at SDSC, UCSD, and Media.net, building production semantic dataset/model discovery using embeddings + Solr KNN and LLM-based intent/reranking at 5M+ dataset scale. Emphasizes offline/online separation for predictable serving, has delivered measurable gains (23% retrieval accuracy, 38% latency reduction) and helped secure a $3M+ NSF grant.”

“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.”

“Co-founded a healthcare AI startup building and deploying software directly with end users, emphasizing rapid shipping, deep user interviews, and workflow-first adoption. Has hands-on production deployment experience on AWS (including diagnosing a silent AWS App Runner failure caused by an ARM vs amd64 Docker build mismatch) and is motivated by customer-facing, travel-heavy roles to keep engineering tightly connected to real-world usage.”

“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.”

“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.”