Patrick Varin
Staff Robotics AI Engineer at Figure
South San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPatrick Varin is a Staff Robotics AI Engineer with 11 years of experience building motion planning, trajectory optimization, and state estimation for autonomous systems, from self-driving cars to humanoid robots. He blends classical optimization and machine learning, integrating planning closely with perception and control to deliver production-ready autonomy stacks. Patrick has driven high-impact projects at Figure, Cruise, Zipline, and Boston Dynamics—contributing to Atlas’ dynamic behaviors and even dance and parkour research—while shipping backend bindings to the influential RobotLocomotion/drake library. With a PhD from Harvard and a strong foundation in physics, math, and numerical simulation, he pairs deep technical research with product-focused leadership, managing cross-functional teams to bring robotics capabilities into real-world use.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science at Harvard UniversityBachelor of Science (BS) Engineering: Robotics, Bachelor of Science (BS) Engineering: Robotics at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
English, French
Github Skills (6)
robotics10
python10
drake10
cprogramming-language9
c-language9
gurobi9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
RobotLocomotion/drake
Jun 2018 - Aug 2018
Model-based design and verification for robotics.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 7 PRs, 18 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:Patrick contributed significantly to the `drake` repository by adding Python bindings, particularly for systems-related functionalities like `TrajectorySource`, `Demultiplexer`, and `InverseDynamics`. Their work involved modifying core system components, creating and integrating bindings, and updating test files. They also made changes to support integration with external libraries, such as Gurobi.
model-basedmodel-based-designroboticsdrakeverification
HarvardAgileRoboticsLab/gym-drake
Aug 2018 - Nov 2018
Glue between Drake and OpenAI Gym.
Contributions:33 commits, 2 PRs, 23 pushes in 2 months
drakereinforcement-learningopenaigluegym
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