Vetted Teaching Assistants

“CMU robotics PhD/PhD researcher and former CMU Robotics Club project lead who built a novel Bayes-filter-based system to localize within music so robotic instruments can follow a human’s tempo in real time. Also works on simulation-heavy multi-agent vehicle routing with traffic-signal scheduling, optimizing for real-time performance via profiling, multithreading, and neural-network surrogates for signal control.”

“LLM/multimodal systems builder who developed DuetGen, a practical multimodal interleaved text-image generation system using a decoupled MLLM planner and video-pretrained diffusion transformer for high-quality image generation with step-wise alignment. Built a 298K-sample interleaved dataset across 8 domains/151 subtasks and deployed a GPT-5-based automated evaluation framework; also has LangChain-based multimodal agent orchestration experience with custom state management and reliability testing.”

Timothy Mazenge

Screened

Mid-Level Software Engineer specializing in Ads frontend and high-scale web platforms

Kirkland, WA6y exp

“Backend engineer with ad-tech experience who improved advertiser dashboard accuracy by exempting 1% of traffic from ML-based dropping in a ~1B-requests/day pipeline, trading storage for higher customer satisfaction and reduced debugging load. Demonstrates strong migration discipline (phased rollouts, compatibility layers, rollback/change-history recovery) and production API/security practices in Python/FastAPI (async, caching, throttling, RBAC/RLS, monitoring).”

“Backend/data engineer with Amazon supply-chain experience building production serverless Python services and ETL pipelines on AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, S3, RDS, Glue). Has modernized legacy SAS jobs into Python with rigorous parity testing and phased migrations, and has delivered major SQL performance gains (minutes down to seconds) through indexing and partitioning.”

“Robotics software candidate with hands-on experience building controllers for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, including dual-PID control in Python with state-space modeling and a planned path to LQR. Developed ROS nodes for odometry-based localization, waypoint planning, and control command publishing, validated through a custom Gazebo/ROS simulation workflow with control-metric-driven testing. Also worked on F1Tenth simulation and scan-matching localization (PL-ICP), with additional cloud deployment experience using Docker/Kubernetes and CI/CD.”

Aditya Sawant

Screened

Mid-level Software Development Engineer specializing in robotics and cloud-based device management

North Reading, Massachusetts3y exp

“Amazon Robotics engineer who deployed and scaled the Lumos camera-based package scanning work cell across EU sort centers (100+ work cells in 5+ sites), enabling remote launches via detailed runbooks and troubleshooting. Strong in AWS IoT/edge systems, with hands-on incident recovery (restored 34 down work cells) and secure multi-compute certificate provisioning using IoT Jobs, ACM/CA, and custom roles; delivered ~75% per-cell cost reduction vs Cognex-based approach.”