# Nikhil Chowdary Paleti

> ML Infra @ Nuro | Ex-Waymo | UC San Diego

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/nikhilchowdarypaleti

🚀 AI Engineer & Researcher

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer @ Nuro
Jan 2026 – Present | Mountain View, California, United States
Model optimization - making models train faster on Nvidia GPUs

### Software Engineer Intern @ Waymo
Jan 2025 – Jan 2025 | Mountain View, California, United States
At Waymo, I developed a model surgery toolkit that automated tensor debugging and eliminated silent checkpoint restoration failures across large-scale training and evaluation pipelines, reducing debugging time by over 90% (from days to hours). I extended this toolkit to enable automated foundation model conversion between Waymo’s internal infrastructure and Google DeepMind’s Gemini training stack. Additionally, I implemented dataset checkpointing within Waymo’s foundation model pipelines using Grain, enabling fault-tolerant and resumable training. My work also included profiling tf.data and Python backends to guide throughput optimizations for large-scale distributed workloads.

### Machine Learning Engineer @ Tech Profuse Pvt Ltd
Jan 2024 – Jan 2024 | Hyderabad, Telangana, India
At Tech Profuse, I developed an unstructured data extraction API powered by Gemini, processing over 50,000 bill of lading documents in 15 hours and reducing manual data entry by 98%. I also built a multimodal data extraction prototype by fine-tuning a LLaVA model with distributed training (FSDP/ZeRO) across 8 GPUs, significantly improving visual-text alignment accuracy. In parallel, I engineered a RAG-based support system leveraging Cohere LLMs for natural language issue querying, classification, and summarization—boosting support throughput by 130%.


## Education
### Master of Science - MS in Data Science
Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, UC San Diego

### Bachelor of Technology - BTech in Artificial Intelligence
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham

### High School Diploma in Physical Sciences
Sri Chaitanya College of Education

### High School Diploma in Biological and Physical Sciences
Sri Chaitanya Techno School


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nikhil-paleti
- Portfolio: https://nikhil-paleti.github.io

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Source: https://flows.cv/nikhilchowdarypaleti
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/nikhilchowdarypaleti/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-11