Vetted Research Assistants in Texas

Ritika Ghosh

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Junior Robotics & AI Engineer specializing in ROS2 autonomy and real-time computer vision

Dallas, US3y exp

“Robotics software engineer from Stanley Black & Decker’s autonomous team who built and deployed a ROS2-based model predictive control system for a commercial autonomous lawn mower, integrating real-time localization, Nav2 planning, and custom control under real-time constraints. Has hands-on field debugging experience (Foxglove, TF timing, covariance/noise tuning) to resolve issues that only appeared outside simulation, plus containerized deployment and CI/CD experience.”

Swarnabha Roy

Screened

Mid-level Robotics & Computer Vision Engineer specializing in autonomous systems and edge AI

College Station, TX6y exp

“Robotics/perception researcher (MVOS Lab, South Dakota State University) who built an end-to-end multimodal RGB-D + LiDAR pipeline for autonomous greenhouse harvesting and 3D plant phenotyping. Demonstrated strong production ownership by diagnosing motion blur with ROS-bag + OpenCV metrics and shipping an edge-deployed, scan-quality-aware workflow that boosted barcode read rate to 98% and supported ~70% autonomous pepper detection/harvesting accuracy.”

Pranav Puranik

Screened

Senior AI Engineer specializing in LLMs, RAG, and multimodal NLP

Austin, TX5y exp

“Built a production LLM/RAG assistant for insurance/health claims agents that ingests 100–200 page patient PDFs via OCR (migrated from local Tesseract to Azure Document Intelligence) and delivers grounded claim detail retrieval plus summaries with PII/PHI guardrails. Experienced orchestrating large workflows with Celery worker pipelines and AWS Step Functions (S3-triggered, Fargate-based batch inference/accuracy aggregation), and collaborates closely with non-technical SMEs (claims agents/nurses) through shadowing, iterative demos, and SME-defined evaluation.”

“Robotics engineer who built a 6-axis force-torque sensor system end-to-end at ROAM Lab, including electronics, low-level drivers, and ROS2 live inference with time-series deep learning (ultimately a 1D ResNet) to handle highly noisy, session-shifting signals. Also upgraded tactile manipulation models to time-series inputs by modifying long-standing ROS architectures, and has prior experience in defense (L3Harris) with production-grade testing and code review practices; published work: arxiv.org/abs/2410.03481.”

“AI engineer building and deploying deep-learning-based optimization/control systems for petrochemical plants, with a focus on maintaining operational stability under real-world constraints. Core contributor to model and inference design; introduced a stability-focused non-linear objective and sped up second-layer optimization via on-the-fly first-order approximations. Experienced using Kubernetes for end-to-end testing and effective in translating customer expectations into measurable evaluation plots for non-technical stakeholders.”

“Robotics software engineer who led an end-to-end learning-based UAV controller project, addressing oscillation issues through simulation, gain tuning, and a shift to geometric control. Has ROS experience spanning UAV mocap-based perception and an autonomous driving stack (LiDAR, mapping, AMCL, controller), plus real-world distributed ROS communication over WiFi with performance troubleshooting.”

“Robotics software engineer with hands-on sim-to-real experience: built and deployed a reinforcement-learning vision policy at The Boring Company to align a robot end effector to tunnel lining engagement holes, owning the full pipeline (SolidWorks/URDF modeling, PyBullet + Stable-Baselines3 training, and on-machine deployment). Also modified ArduPilot and tested custom drone algorithms via ROS/Gazebo using MAVROS and VICON-based localization.”

“Capgemini engineer with 4+ years building and deploying high-availability, low-latency fraud detection APIs and multi-cluster distributed systems for a Fortune 20 bank, including zero-downtime production rollouts and multi-layer (SQL/network/hardware) performance debugging. Also built a Python + OpenAI/LangChain LLM-powered grading workflow for Austin School for Women, cutting feedback time from 90 minutes to 5 minutes per submission for 200+ learners.”

Sundarajan Swaminathan

Screened

Senior Product Marketing Leader specializing in GTM strategy and RevOps analytics

Dallas, TX7y exp

“Growth creative/performance marketer from BYJU'S (India) who runs disciplined creative experimentation across Meta, TikTok, and YouTube. Notably shifted messaging from feature-led to outcome/testimonial-led creative, delivering CPA down 27%, ROAS up 35%, and +11% trial-to-paid conversion, and has experience leading a small creative pod (editors + writer) with a rapid-iteration production system.”