Looking for a job

David Siff

@davidsiff1

Robotics research engineer at Georgia Tech building ROS2 simulation and validation pipelines for sim-to-real robotic manipulation.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking to build analytical performance models, functional simulators, and virtual platforms that support architecture exploration and realistic software workloads for AI inference accelerators.

At Georgia Tech’s Hands-On Safety Robotics VIP Lab, I’m designing a ROS2-based, low-latency simulation environment to train and validate an imitation-learning policy for a robotic manipulator arm. The work evaluates MuJoCo, PyBullet, and NVIDIA Isaac Sim/Lab.

I’m building a three-stage validation pipeline spanning teleoperated data collection, in-simulation policy evaluation, and real-robot deployment. I’m also designing stress tests for object ambiguity, module failures, and long-horizon error compounding.

My projects include a ConvNeXT and Swin Transformer ensemble for skin cancer classification, which achieved an AUC of 0.936 with 94K parameters, and a combinatorial optimizer that reduced an exponential problem to near-linear runtime. I’m pursuing an M.S. in Computer Science at Georgia Tech, focused on computational perception and robotics.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Founder & Executive Director

Current

Kol HaLev / Jewish Virtual Academy

Jan 2019 - Present (7 years 9 months)

Built and scaled a multi-faculty virtual learning organization, managing faculty, curriculum, and online platform operations serving learners nationally.

Leadership Curriculum Development Digital Platform Management Faculty Management

Robotics Research Engineer

Hands-On Safety Robotics VIP Lab

Sep 2026 - Aug 2027 (11 months)

Designing a ROS2-based simulation environment using MuJoCo, PyBullet, and NVIDIA Isaac Sim/Lab to train and validate an imitation-learning policy for a robotic manipulator arm. Building a three-stage validation pipeline and stress-test scenarios for a Motion-Planner/VLA-Interleaving architecture.

ROS2 MuJoCo PyBullet NVIDIA Isaac Lab Imitation Learning Sensor Fusion Probabilistic Modeling Motion Planning

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Georgia Tech

Jun 2025 - Aug 2027 (2 years 2 months)

Lead weekly whiteboard sessions and office hours for 100+ graduate students on search algorithms, Bayesian networks, and ML fundamentals. Provide hands-on debugging support in PyTorch, NumPy, and Python across multiple IDEs.

PyTorch NumPy Python Search Algorithms Bayesian Networks Machine Learning