Ilia Baranov is a pragmatic robotics CTO and co-founder with 11 years of hands-on experience turning research prototypes into production autonomy for industrial vehicles. Based in San Francisco, he blends electrical engineering roots from the University of Waterloo with leadership at Polymath Robotics and prior engineering management across Clearpath and Amazon’s Astro program, shipping perception, motion, and SLAM-driven systems. He favors Swiss-army-knife solutions—prioritizing speed and versatility under tight deadlines—and excels at making compelling demos that push robotic capabilities into real-world deployments. A former satellite C&C and signal-analysis engineer, he brings uncommon cross-domain fluency that helps bridge low-level hardware, embedded electronics, and high-level autonomy stacks. Outside work he channels the same experimental curiosity into rock climbing, snowboarding, and hardware hacking.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
BASci Electrical Engineering, BASci Electrical Engineering at University of Waterloo
Contributions:1 PR, 6 pushes, 1 branch in 10 months
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