Vetted Research Assistants

“Unity/VR developer who has shipped on Meta Quest (SideQuest) and built standalone PCVR medical applications used with real patients. Built a fully solo roguelike twin-stick shooter with a highly modular ScriptableObject/state-machine architecture, including custom build-time tooling to overcome Unity runtime constraints. Uses AI selectively (e.g., Claude) to generate editor tooling like a match-3 level designer to speed up level production.”

“Unity VR developer with deep hands-on experience optimizing and debugging standalone-headset VR projects (including Android/IL2CPP and XR interaction systems), though not yet credited with a Meta Quest store ship. Built and shipped a mostly solo Unity top-down shooter (Sand Bullet) on Steam, owning core gameplay, AI, UI/input, saves, performance, and an AWS-connected companion app integration.”

“Built and deployed production RAG-based document search/Q&A systems (DocChat and an internship marketing RAG), using a React + FastAPI stack on GCP with docs stored in GCP buckets and retrieval via embeddings/vector DB. Emphasizes cost/performance tradeoffs (reported ~40% cost reduction) and ships via Docker (Railway), with load/API testing using JMeter and Swagger; regularly collaborates with a CEO stakeholder to iterate and push changes to production.”

“Built and operated large-scale biodiversity/ecological research platforms, integrating 50+ heterogeneous global datasets into a unified BIEN 3 schema on PostgreSQL/PostGIS and improving data consistency by 35%. Strong production engineering background (Linux monitoring, CI/CD performance gates, Docker on AWS/Azure) plus applied AI work building a Python RAG system (0.90 precision) and halving latency with Elasticsearch.”

“Backend/cloud engineer from Resilient Tech with hands-on experience deploying REST APIs and database migrations into a live ERP used by real customers while maintaining 99% uptime. Has debugged intermittent AWS container timeouts down to security group/load balancer misconfigurations, and has extended Python in an ERPNext system to meet GST/e-invoicing compliance requirements with strong customer collaboration.”

“Built and deployed ForensicLLM, a local domain-specific LLaMA-3.1-8B model for digital forensic investigators using RAFT + RAG over 1000+ curated research papers, with citation-aware responses and rigorous evaluation (BERTScore/G-Eval). Deployed via vLLM and Docker and validated through a chatbot survey with 80+ participants; published at DFRWS EU 2025.”

“Union College robotics graduate with hands-on ROS experience building an independent “waiter bot” that took spoken orders (Mozilla DeepSpeech), used OpenCV, and navigated via SLAM on a TurtleBot with LiDAR. Also led the Union College Robotics crew for four years and implemented PID control for micromouse maze robots; has additional software deployment experience with Dockerized FastAPI and CI/CD from coursework.”

“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.”

“Software engineer with hands-on production experience deploying Spring Boot services to AWS using Docker and Jenkins CI/CD, focused on stable releases, easy rollback, and performance improvements through monitoring/logging and query optimization. Has proven cross-layer troubleshooting skills (identified packet loss causing intermittent timeouts via network traces) and experience collaborating on-site with operators in industrial/IoT-style environments, including working alongside robotics/PLC teams.”

“AI Researcher with production experience building a real-time computer-vision detection pipeline augmented by an LLM-based verification layer to cut false positives (~78%) and reach ~90% real-world accuracy. Also partners cross-functionally with Product/Sales/Marketing to shape AI feature prioritization and market positioning using analysis and interactive dashboards.”

“Master’s thesis engineer who built and deployed a continuous real-time perception + state estimation + control loop under tight latency constraints, owning both software architecture and hardware integration. Strong ROS 2 fundamentals with a systems-first approach—stabilizes robotic behavior by instrumenting, logging/replaying real data, and fixing timing/synchronization issues rather than treating failures as purely algorithmic.”

“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.”

“Built and deployed a production-grade LLM agent for credit management and accounts receivable automation, integrating ERP/MySQL data via a RAG pipeline and exposing services through FastAPI with Pydantic-validated outputs on AWS Bedrock. Emphasizes reliability and compliance for financial operations using schema validation and human-in-the-loop review, reporting ~32% reduction in manual work and ~41% improvement in response time/reliability.”

“Built and deployed production LLM applications including a natural-language-to-read-only-SQL system focused on ambiguity handling and query safety (schema whitelisting, intent validation, confidence checks, deterministic execution). Experienced with LangChain-based, modular agent orchestration and RAG document QA for large PDFs, with a metrics-driven testing/evaluation approach and cross-functional delivery with marketing on an AI content recommendation/search tool.”

“Open-source-focused TypeScript/JavaScript engineer who built a lightweight Node.js utility library to standardize LLM-agent message formatting, tool invocation, and safe schema-validated JSON outputs. Emphasizes composable abstractions, real-world performance profiling/benchmarks, and strong community feedback loops (GitHub issues, structured errors, logging hooks). Also did research at Syracuse University on converting natural language into structured JSON with validation layers.”

“Software engineer (Lance Soft Engineering) who built a Java/gRPC real-time request tracking system supporting ~20K simultaneous requests, using Kafka event streaming and PostgreSQL to improve transparency and cut support requests by 35%. Demonstrates strong production operations skills—resolved live latency spikes with Kafka async messaging (+48% throughput) and executed safe migrations using parallel runs, staging validation, and blue-green deployments.”

“Robotics software engineer focused on UAV multi-agent collision avoidance, combining Behavior Trees with MPC and validating in a ROS-based simulator via PX4 hardware-in-the-loop. Has hands-on experience debugging real-time estimation/control issues (EKF noise/arming failures), building distributed ROS service architectures, and smoothing MPC trajectories to meet kinematic and FAA right-of-way constraints.”

“PhD in computer engineering who has built production-oriented ML/NLP systems for space-weather prediction using Spark-based ETL on noisy satellite sensor logs. Strong in entity resolution and semantic search—fine-tuned E5 embeddings with contrastive learning and deployed to Pinecone, improving top-5 retrieval precision by 25%—and emphasizes scalable, observable pipelines with Airflow, Docker, and CI/CD.”

“Built and owned Python backend APIs for real-time educational dashboards at ASU’s Machine Learning lab, improving responsiveness by cutting latency ~35% through caching, batching, and profiling-driven optimizations. Has hands-on experience containerizing Node.js/Python services and running GitOps-style CI/CD with GitHub Actions, plus supporting smaller infrastructure transitions with reproducible, portable configs.”

“Game developer from a student-led team that shipped a Steam vertical slice (Skyguard), a 3rd-person co-op wave defense shooter. Built core gameplay systems (weapons, movement, wave progression), a UE5 Blueprint/C++ microgame framework, and a gameplay-tag-driven cue system to speed VFX/audio iteration; actively tuned balance using structured playtest feedback and fixed multiple high-impact gameplay bugs.”