About

Hitesh Arora is a Robotics and Reinforcement Learning Engineer at Amazon, currently working on scaling the Scout autonomous delivery robots. With a passion for building technological solutions to solve real-world problems, he has a particular interest in the domains of robotics, healthcare, and climate change. Hitesh graduated with a Master's in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he worked with Prof. Jeff Schneider on designing sample-efficient deep reinforcement algorithms for self-driving. Before joining graduate school, he worked at Microsoft for 3 years, shipping multiple hyper-scale distributed and analytics solutions currently being used by millions of cloud users. He also graduated with a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Guwahati in 2015, gaining first-hand research experience through internships at top universities of MIT, CMU, and UQ supported by various scholarships. Aside from his work in the tech industry, Hitesh is deeply concerned with social problems, particularly Delhi's alarming pollution. He co-founded the Charvesting project with Dr. Brian Von Herzen from the Climate Foundation NGO to solve open-rice straw burning problems and was awarded a $100K grant by the government for the pilot project. He has also served as a volunteer teacher to underprivileged students over the last several years. Hitesh's relevant experience includes 6.11 years of working in the tech industry, with expertise in Reinforcement Learning, ML, Research Scientist, Deep Learning, AI, Azure, Software Engineer, and infra. He has worked as a Graduate Research Assistant at CMU, studying and designing sample-efficient deep reinforcement learning algorithms for self-driving as part of Auton Lab, Robotics Institute, and CMU Argo AI Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research. He has also worked as a Software Engineer II in the core Azure team at Microsoft, where he learned to design and implement hyper-scale distributed and analytics systems and shipped several projects. Overall, Hitesh is a driven and accomplished individual with a strong passion for using technology to make a positive impact on the world.