About Me
👋 Hey, I'm Ambarish
I am a robotics and AI engineer who has spent 5 years building things at the intersection of software and physical hardware, from IoT fleets at scale to humanoid robots to vision-language models for autonomous driving. I also like to make jokes, eat street food, and play board games with people who take them very seriously.
🔍 What Drives Me
The thing that drives me is figuring out what someone actually needs, not just what they asked for. That applies whether I am debugging a production system for an enterprise customer, designing data pipelines for a humanoid robot, or helping an international student navigate their first semester in the US. I lead with curiosity and I do not stop until the problem is actually solved.
🛤️ How I Got Here
I started as a software developer in India, building IoT platforms and backend systems at startups. At SmartHub.ai I led a team of 6 managing 10K+ cameras and IoT devices for enterprise clients. When a password rotation knocked thousands of devices offline and nobody knew why, I reverse engineered the issue across the full stack, got every device back online, and wrote the testing protocol to prevent it happening again. That experience shaped how I think about building software that other people depend on.
That work made me curious about what happens where software meets hardware, so I moved to the US to pursue an M.S. in Computer Engineering at San Jose State University. My thesis (MoRAL) showed that a small VLM on consumer hardware can match safety-critical autonomous driving decisions made by models 4x its size, if you encode real sensor data the right way. Under review at IEEE IMC 2026. At Toborlife I build data infrastructure for real Unitree G1 humanoids and Go2 quadrupeds.
🎓 Teaching and Mentoring
I genuinely believe the best way to learn something is to teach it. That is why I share my work through:
- YouTube videos with project demos, tutorials, and breakdowns of what I build
- Medium articles going deeper into robotics, AI, and engineering concepts
- Open-source code so others can learn from it, use it, and make it better
I also peer mentor international students at SJSU, serve as a Global Leader helping students settle into campus life, and have taught robotics to primary school kids. I volunteer at community events and food pantries. I think the most interesting version of any technical field is one where more people are included in it.
🔧 How I Work
I prefer small, iterative changes over big rewrites. I instrument what I build so I can see what is actually happening. I value clear communication and enjoy working with people from all kinds of backgrounds, technical and non-technical. I am comfortable across the full stack, from embedded firmware to cloud infrastructure, but most energized when solving problems right at the boundary where software meets the physical world.
🎯 What I Am Looking For
I am looking for Robotics Software Engineer, ML/AI Engineer, AI Agent Systems, and SWE roles, especially at teams working on autonomous systems, humanoid robots, physical AI, and perception. I bring both 3+ years of production SWE experience and hands-on robotics research, so I am comfortable in a 10-person robotics startup or a large engineering org. US-based, open to relocation, available May 2026.
🏀 When I'm Not Coding
🤝 Want to connect or learn together?
Whether you're exploring robotics, AI, or just getting started in tech, I'm always happy to chat, mentor, or collaborate. Don't be a stranger!
Let's talk →