John Shepherd
Senior Software Engineer, Research Software Engineering at Toyota Research Institute
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Shepherd is a Senior Software Engineer specializing in research software engineering, currently building tooling and scalable software for robotics and ML teams at Toyota Research Institute in the San Francisco Bay Area. With five years of professional experience and an academic background (BS and MS in Computer Science from George Washington University), he bridges research needs and production-quality implementations across C++, Python, Bazel/CMake, and cloud infrastructure. He has contributed to robot simulation and rendering stacks (Ignition, Drake), optimized ML model deployment pipelines (PyTorch, TVM, ONNX, TorchScript), and architected AWS/Terraform automation for model compilation and benchmarking on edge devices like the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin. Comfortable across front-end (React, Node) to low-level systems and real-time robotics work, he pairs strong engineering craft with practical research contributions, including a publication on fast contact-patch approximation. He also mentors students and led a senior design team to an award, reflecting a knack for translating complex technical problems into teachable, user-friendly solutions. Notably, he was the inaugural member of TRI’s RSE team, shaping the group’s approaches to tooling and reproducible research practices.
5 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, 3.83, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, 3.83 at The George Washington UniversityBriarcrest Christian High School
English, French
Github Skills (6)
robotics10
drake8
synthesis6
react-library4
vscode3
llm1
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
JShep-tri/drake
Mar 2021 - May 2023
Model-based design and verification for robotics.
Contributions:14 PRs, 41 pushes, 15 branches in 2 years 2 months
model-basedmodel-based-designroboticsverification
JShep-tri/piro
Jun 2021 - Sep 2021
Software for evaluating pareto-optimal synthesis pathways
Contributions:6 PRs, 16 pushes, 8 branches in 3 months
paretosynthesisoptimalpathways
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.