Work

I am currently a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Waymo, formerly known as the Google self-driving car project. As an Area Technical Lead (aka an "uber TL") on the Planner team, I help set the strategy for how the Waymo driver generates behavior that is safe, smooth, and predictable to other road users. My day-to-day work is at the intersection of data science, motion planning, robotics, machine learning, software engineering, and safety-critical system design.

Waymo is the first commercial self-driving service that operates without safety backup drivers in the vehicle.

I was an early employee and a Director of Engineering at Berkshire Grey (BG), a robotics solutions provider for warehouse automation and logistics. I started and co-led a project that designed, built, and deployed an automated distribution/fulfillment system that employs a fleet of mobile robots to transport items between robotic picking cells and other kinds of fixed automation.

The system includes a variety of custom hardware and electrical components: mobile robots, robotic picking stations, sensors and actuators, conveyors, sensors, displays, and functional safety sensors. These components are controlled as a cohesive system by custom orchestration, machine vision, planning, and control software that employs state-of-the-art techniques from machine learning, computer vision, motion planning, and operations research.

Under my leadership, the project team grew in size by two orders of magnitude while progressing from need-finding to solution ideation, design, proof of concept, commercial pilot, and production. In part due this project, BG grew from a small startup to a public company valued at $2.7 billion and with a clients including FedEx, Target, and Walmart.