# Ian Sherman

> Software Engineer, Robotics

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/iansherman

A software engineer specializing in robotics and creative technology. I've been fortunate to collaborate with excellent teams in both individual contributor and leadership roles. I enjoy bringing software engineering rigor to ambitious teams, constantly learning, and multidisciplinary collaboration. I value trust and communication, good writing, craftsmanship, and the big beautiful physical world.

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ Space-ng
Jan 2023 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States
Developing vision navigation capabilities for a lunar lander mission through NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.

### Independent Consultant @ Unknown
Jan 2020 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States
Robotics software engineer on a small team of experienced consultants brought together to build custom camera motion control for a prestige film production. Solved complex latency and controls problems involving proprietary hardware, diverse display and sensor technologies, distributed clocks, and software.

C++, Linux, functional safety, film and VFX technology, industrial and custom robotics hardware.

### Head of Software @ Formant
Jan 2017 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco, CA
As founding engineer, defined a product roadmap to provide cloud infrastructure for the robotics industry. Core features include teleoperation, fleet management, and remote observability. Hired and led a team of 10 software engineers. 

Led the architecture of a full-stack distributed system capable of horizontally scalable telemetry ingestion, fine-grained authentication and authorization, wide-area-network resilience, cost-effective historical data analysis, and advanced visualization.

Implemented key software components including core data models, IAM, distributed caches, and a web services framework. 

Golang, Typescript, AWS.

### Staff Software Engineer / Tech Lead / Manager @ X, formerly known as Google[x]
Jan 2013 – Jan 2017
Led a team of 12 software engineers building engineering tools and human-machine interfaces for Google Robotics / X's robotics initiatives.

Visualization, logging, and data infrastructure for geometric, vision, and time-series data.  C++, QT, Angular, ThreeJS.

### Lead Engineer @ Bot & Dolly
Jan 2011 – Jan 2013
Led a small multi-disciplinary engineering team building custom robotics integrations for television, stage, and live events. Clients included Adidas, Toyota, Google, Autodesk, Blue Man Group, and Disney. 

Industrial robots, film and stage technology, display technology, functional safety, Python, C++, EtherCAT, Maya, TouchDesigner.

### Software Developer @ Castlight Health
Jan 2010 – Jan 2011

### Computer Science Teacher @ SMIC Private School
Jan 2008 – Jan 2009

### Head Teaching Assistant / Teaching Assistant @ Brown University
Jan 2005 – Jan 2008


## Education
### Computer Science
Brown University
Jan 2004 – Jan 2008


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ian-j-sherman
- Website: https://ianjsherman.com

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Source: https://flows.cv/iansherman
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/iansherman/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-22