Vetted Teaching Assistants in the NYC Metro

“Built and shipped a production LLM-powered investor research feature for a fintech product, focused on grounded answers and minimizing hallucinations. Implemented retrieval-quality and evidence-coverage gating with clear refusal fallbacks, and evaluates systems with regression tests and metrics like correct-refusal rate, hallucination rate, and latency. Comfortable orchestrating workflows with LangChain or custom Python depending on production needs.”

“Built a hackathon "Patient Summary Assistant" backend focused on healthcare workflows, combining RAG-based summarization with HIPAA-minded privacy controls (NER redaction + encryption). Demonstrated strong infra skills by deploying on Kubernetes with Helm/HPA and GitOps (ArgoCD), plus migrating from OpenAI to an on-prem Llama 3 stack (vLLM, quantization, shadow-mode testing) and adding real-time Kafka ingestion for patient vitals/anomaly alerts.”

“Operator-founder currently building two apps to MVP, handling everything from market research and test-user feedback to hands-on product changes in FlutterFlow and Visily. In a prior large-scale portfolio environment, they brought order to a highly disorganized 100+ person, 26-value-stream delivery organization by standardizing Jira workflows, creating stakeholder cadences, and lifting predictability from 30% to 86%.”

“Founding engineer for an AI product (“world’s first funny AI”) who designed and implemented the full-stack architecture (React/TypeScript + Node) and migrated production from Vercel to AWS. Shipped a Lambda-based image pipeline that eliminated lag/missing images and brought page load times to under a second, and has hands-on experience integrating multiple LLM providers (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Grok) with structured-output and self-check reliability techniques.”

Barath Kumar Jayachandran Kanchanamalini

Screened

Junior Robotics & Controls Engineer specializing in UAV autonomy and embedded systems

New York, NY1y exp

“Robotics software engineer focused on autonomous drones and mobile robotics: implemented a sliding mode inner-loop controller and a RealSense T265 VIO state-estimation pipeline integrated into ArduPilot EKF3 for GPS-denied indoor flight. Strong simulation-to-deployment experience (Gazebo/MAVROS to firmware), ROS2 networking/debugging, and hands-on validation through multi-sensor trials and log analysis.”

Zhiwen Zhao

Screened

Junior Data Engineer specializing in cloud ETL and big data platforms

New York, NY3y exp

“Data engineer focused on transit/transportation datasets, building Spark-based pipelines that ingest from Oracle/APIs, apply PySpark data-quality fixes, and publish star-schema fact tables to Azure Data Lake. Experienced troubleshooting complex Spark failures (using checkpointing to manage long lineage) and operating Airflow-driven backfills and GitLab CI deployments for production DAGs.”

“Built and productionized an LLM-driven document verification workflow for a construction firm’s submittals process, moving from a Vercel/Next.js prototype to a FastAPI + LangChain/LangGraph backend with background workers and multi-server deployment. Uses LLM tools (e.g., OpenAI Codex/Cloud Code) for rapid development and log-driven root cause analysis, and partners with customer teams on evaluation metrics and iterative improvements.”

“Founding engineer at Novum AI building a real-time call analytics/suggestion backend (transcription + sentiment/tone + context retrieval) using a serverless architecture. Drove major latency improvements (about 4s down to sub-1.5s) and has practical experience hardening production APIs (FastAPI/Pydantic, auth with Cognito/Redis) and payment systems (Stripe) by surfacing overlooked subscription and multi-tenant billing edge cases.”