Vetted Teaching Assistants

“Backend engineer with experience at UnitedHealth Group redesigning a high-traffic Spring Boot microservice from blocking to reactive architecture during peak season, cutting median latency by 47% for a service used by ~10M customers annually. Strong in Kubernetes-based deployment/scaling and pragmatic rollout strategies (blue-green/incremental traffic shifting) with performance and database troubleshooting.”

“Teradata Text Security intern who built a production LLM-powered planner agent that decomposes complex tasks into dependency-aware subtasks (DAG/topological graph) and executes them via a custom orchestrator with parallelism, status tracking, and error handling. Also contributed to an HR-facing internal document chatbot concept to streamline onboarding, showing cross-functional collaboration.”

“Backend-focused engineer with hands-on experience modernizing a legacy SNMP/PNM data collection system at CableLabs into a cloud-accessible Kubernetes pipeline, feeding Prometheus-formatted metrics into VictoriaMetrics and visualizing real-time network health in Grafana for 100+ modems. Also built a FastAPI + Supabase appointment booking portal for a clinic with encryption and phone-number-based auth, and has frontend experience debugging S3-based HEIF image rendering issues.”

“Commercial UNIX specialist and former tech lead for a UNIX-based telco appliance spanning 11 SPARC Solaris servers, with strong Solaris troubleshooting (truss/iostat/netstat/snoop) and extensive shell scripting automation for safer, more consistent operations. Has executed multiple Solaris major-version migrations (6→8→10→11) and brings broad cross-UNIX platform experience (Solaris/SunOS/HP-UX/IRIX/OSF/1), while actively looking to deepen hands-on AIX/IBM Power expertise.”

“Full-stack engineer who built a smart loan approval workflow for a Goldman Sachs hackathon (React/Node/Express/Postgres) including KYC handling, reviewer queues, and an ML-based pre-scoring/auto-reject step. Also has Amazon internship experience driving a customer-facing long-polling change that reduced empty requests by 84%, and demonstrates strong system design depth in real-time voice + LLM streaming architectures.”

“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.”

“Backend engineer focused on scalable, security-first platform architecture—recently built an end-to-end centralized access-control system that launched successfully with ~50k early adopters and was designed to support ~10x traffic growth. Experienced in production authn/authz (token verification, handoff/session migration), and in de-risking migrations via feature flags, phased rollouts, A/B testing, and Splunk-based monitoring.”

“Robotics software candidate focused on simulation-to-learning workflows, building a novel-view-synthesis pipeline (USCiLab3D) with a multi-modal diffusion model and a LiDAR-driven, geometry-aware sampling strategy for selecting overlapping reference views across trajectories/seasons. Also designed coordinated motion planning for two Ridgeback-Franka robots in Isaac Lab for a non-prehensile collaborative task, augmenting controller limitations with RL-based self-collision termination states.”