Abbas Shikari

About Abbas Shikari

I’m a Staff ML Engineer with a focus on simulation, reinforcement learning, and generative modeling. Over the past few years at Cruise, I’ve helped ship dozens of models into self-driving cars — from foundational trajectory planners to GPU-accelerated closed-loop evaluation pipelines.My current interests are split between robotics, diffusion modeling, and LLMs: fine-tuning language models for personalization, post-training techniques, and building lightweight RAG systems for high-leverage domains like document parsing and operator support.Outside of work, I consult with startups on AI strategy, explore small-scale RL projects, and (on occasion) geek out over the latest multimodal AI research. If it’s thoughtful, high-leverage, and hard to solve — I’m in.

Experience

1. Software Engineer

   Waymo

   Aug 2025 — Present

   ML Planning

Education

• University of Rochester

  Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Chemical Engineering

  2010 — 2014

• University of California, Berkeley

  Master of Science (M.S.), Product Development; Chemical Engineering

  2014 — 2015

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  Master of Science (M.S.), Mechanical Engineering

  2016

Skills

• Ir Spectroscopy
• Fun Loving
• Organic Chemistry
• Simulations
• Atomic Force Microscopy
• Product Marketing
• Control Systems Design
• Public Speaking
• Build Strong Relationships
• Labview
• Grit
• Teaching
• Vacuum Deposition
• Imagej
• Matlab
• Materials Science
• Statistics
• Fun at Work
• Sputter Deposition
• Microsoft Excel
• Vba
• Python
• Solidworks
• Mathematica
• Photoshop
• Cad
• Microsoft Word
• Readiness
• Research
• First Impressions
• Data Analysis
• Product Design
• Product Development