- Senior Software Engineer Nvidia ·
- Advisor Wosler Corp ·
Contact Information
San Francisco, CA
ankur.jai.sood [at] gmail.com
LinkedIn
GitHub
Google Scholar
ORCID
Ankur Jai Preferred name Sood
Senior software engineer building L3+ autonomy platforms, shipping reliable data pipelines and safety critical services that keep vehicles compliant and support perception, planning, and recording at scale.
Passionate About:
- Public transit and walkable cities
- Cars and driving on a great backroad
- Cooking experiments
- Games with strategy and storytelling (Catan, RimWorld, AoE II)
- Long hikes with food-related rewards at the end
Exploring and Building:
- AI safety and AI generated content detection
- AI/ML systems for robotics & autonomy
- Agentic AI, tool-using agents, and self-evolving agents
Present Positions
Prior Experience
- Senior Software Engineer Lucid Motors (Formerly: Atieva) ·
- Software Engineer Lucid Motors (Formerly: Atieva) ·
- Software Integration Engineer Ford Motor Company ·
- Application Engineer Bluewrist ·
- Development Engineering Associate (Intern) Celestica ·
- Research Student Hoffman Lab, University of Toronto ·
- Research Student STTARR, University Health Network ·
Publications
DNAmod: the DNA modification database
Sood, A.J.*; Viner, C.*; Hoffman, M.M. · Journal of Cheminformatics, 2019
Patents & Patent Applications
Data Flow Management for Computational Loads
US12430067B2 · Atieva Inc
Status: Granted · Date: 2025-09-30
Lidar Data Compression and Processing
US20250044413A1 · Atieva Inc
Status: Pending · Date: 2022-10-27
System, Method and Device for Remote Ultrasonography
US20250268582A1 · Wosler Corp
Status: Pending · Date: 2023-04-18
Academic Projects
Eye in the Sky: Live Blackjack Card Counting via Real-Time Video Analysis
CS231N · Stanford · Jun 2025
- Real-time pipelines combining YOLOv5 for detection/classification and SegFormer for segmentation under occlusion.
- DeepSORT based tracking with deduplication heuristics to maintain persistent IDs and prevent double counting.
Settling the Odds: AI Agents in Catan
AA228/CS238 · Stanford · Dec 2024
- Framed 4 player Catan as an offline RL problem with reproducible data, training, and evaluation pipeline.
- Implemented DQN with soft target updates, Huber loss, and invalid action masking plus heuristic reward shaping.
Strategies for Optimization of minBERT for Multi-Task Learning
CS224N · Stanford · Jun 2024
- Implemented multi-task minBERT with sentiment, paraphrase, and similarity heads, outperforming single task baselines.
- Explored task schedulers, LoRA, and Projected Attention Layers to cut trainable parameters while improving adaptation.
Variable Compliance Instrument for Laparoscopy
Mechatronic Systems Engineering Capstone · University of Western Ontario · Jun 2018
- Designed and developed a variably compliant laparoscopic instrument that warns operators near obstacles and softens to reduce patient risk.
- Awarded 3rd place at the 2018 Mechatronic Systems Engineering Capstone Design Showcase.
Personal Projects
Lookout
AI marketplace research agent to help organize listings and make purchasing decisions. It scores listings, explains reasoning, asks smart follow up questions, and remembers your preferences across sessions.
Beeline
AI powered multimodal route planning for the Bay Area. Combining driving, parking, and transit in one optimized trip.
HALpdesk
Terminal copilot that turns natural language into bash commands. Provides a chat feature for guidance, juggles multiple sessions, and warns users before running dangerous commands.