Amar Gandhi

Experience

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  WHS Robotics

  Sept 2016 - Jun 2020

  Software Team Lead

  FIRST Robotics is a high school competition in which teams design, build, and test a robot to meet the requirements of a competition.• Mentored 7 younger students in Java programming, Git VCS, and software design• Led team software development process (SDLC) for 3 years, through design of system requirements, development, and testing• Created mature codebase now in 6th year of use, employing object oriented programming (OOP)• Integrated sensors (analog, digital, I2C, PWM) and hardware systems with robot software• Presented team software to competition judges, winning multiple awards for best software through robust documentation and competitive performance Show less

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  SibLinks, Inc.

  Nov 2016 - Mar 2017

  Independent Contractor

  QA tested and populated a social mentorship platform designed to connect high school and college students.

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  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  Apr 2021 - Jan 2022

  Student Researcher

  • 2nd author of peer-reviewed paper published and presented at IEEE SoutheastCon 2022 focused on optimizing existing object detectors for handheld detection (computer vision/machine learning)• Trained machine learning models in GPU/CUDA accelerated Kubernetes cluster• Organized friend-sourced annotation of 3,700 image dataset through creation of React JavaScript based annotation program, GitHub pages, and cloud storage bucket• Designed a novel pipeline, “SHOP”, which filters likely false positives from by localizing detections using state of the art (SOTA) methods in pose estimation and image deblurring, achieving 70% filtering of false positives (vs 17% of true positives filtered) Show less

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  San Diego State University

  Jun 2021 - Aug 2021

  Research Intern

  • Performed >50 simulations on a digital pheromone-based navigation model for drones in Python• Optimized codebase for 8-10x speedup through use of parallel processing, memory layout optimizations, and just-in-time compilation • Plotted aggregate results of 40+ trails for presentation using Matplotlib

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  VMware

  Jun 2022 - Aug 2022

  Software Engineer Intern

  • Deployed 7+ end user accessible services on self-hosted Kubernetes cluster, using vSphere + ESXi hypervisor• Presented talk at KubeCon North America 2022 on self-hosting entertainment, productivity, and IOT apps using Kubernetes and microservices architecture, reaching >250 people• Stood up and administered networking + other tools, including logging (Kibana & Prometheus), VLANs, LDAP authentication, ingresses, load balancers, and SSL certificates• Wrote Python+Svelte JS web-application with video live stream and IOT interaction to demonstrate home automation capabilities to VMware employees + others • Documented progress in series of blog posts for public consumption: https://homelab.acgandhi.com Show less

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  The Aerospace Corporation

  May 2023 - Aug 2023

  Cloud Software Engineer Intern

  • Migrated 3 NodeJS based web application services to Jenkins CI & ArgoCD on Kubernetes cluster, improving project reliability, security, and sustainability versus previous manual deployment steps• Benchmarked performance of machine learning algorithms on 16 GPU / 2 node compute cluster, utilizing Nvidia InfiniBand NVLink technologies to show 3x increase in system performance