Experience | Porvesh Balasubramanian

Founding Engineer

Building AI agents for chip design and verification.

Research Assistant

Built, controlled and raced the F1Tenth autonomous vehicle.

Built a real-time LiDAR perception pipeline, turning raw scans into Follow the Gap steering commands fast enough to keep up with the control loop.
Worked on SLAM, localization with a particle filter, and Pure Pursuit, all running live on the car as it moved.
Developed scan matching with fast correspondence search for low-latency pose estimation.
Created a safety node with iTTC emergency braking and PID-controlled wall-following that reacted in real time.
Raced the car around campus buildings.

Distributed Systems Research Assistant

Runtime verification for distributed systems.

Contributed to OathKeeper (OSDI '22), a low-overhead runtime verification toolchain that infers and enforces semantic rules to catch silent violations in ZooKeeper, HDFS, and Kafka at ~1% overhead.
Built a Javassist-based runtime instrumentation and event tracing pipeline, capturing trigger arguments from Java services and routing them through a lock-free queue to the checker for precondition pattern matching.

Networking Software Engineering Intern

PXE boot image generation and automation.

Configured DHCP, TFTP, FTP servers, and the bootloader to enable Manual Network Booting using PXE.
Developed Bash scripts and used Packer to automate the Boot Image Generation.
Ensured successful deployment of ISO Images and seamless booting of desired Linux operating systems.
Got to look at cool planes up close in the hangar.

Graduate Student Instructor

Teaching and mentoring students in advanced data structures and algorithms, developing educational materials for computer science concepts.

Conducted in-person and virtual office hours, helping students in code debugging, reinforcing course concepts, and nurturing their programming skills.
Conducted personalized, one-on-one tutoring sessions to support students in upper-level engineering courses.

Software Engineering Intern

Full stack development.

Revamped user experience by designing and implementing Flask-based backend for the website.
Implemented impactful visual changes using Quasar Framework.

Research Assistant

Research assistance on UCLID5, a modeling and verification language for computer systems and hardware verification.

Worked on UCLID5 an integrated modeling, verification and synthesis tool.
Developed a HTML, JavaScript, and Python program for visualizing 50+ JSON files, highlighting differences between successive iterations.

Teaching Assistant

Teaching assistant for introductory programming courses, helping students learn fundamental coding concepts and problem-solving skills.

Contributed to develop weekly lesson plans in Python for Pathbird, a platform targeted at high school students without prior experience in coding and Computer Science.
Had an amazing experience teaching Python to over 1500 students from all over the world.
Check out the Joy of Coding website: Joy of Coding.

Research Assistant

Research assistant at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, conducting business and technology research.

Worked as a research assistant that was part of the team that received the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Visionary Grant (with professors: Dr. Sue Ashford, Dr. Brianna Caza, and Dr. Brittany Lambert).
Conducted and coded interviews of individuals working in the gig economy and compared them with individuals working in traditional organizations to investigate relational and social challenges.
Conducted literature review of top 20 journals to examine the intersection of leadership and communication.