Zhuo Chen, Ph.D.
Software Engineer
Professional Experience
Software Development Engineer | Amazon, Fuse
Dec 2022 – Present | Seattle, WALed the development of a new mobile number OTP-based payment method that allows Amazon to bill mobile carriers directly for customer Prime subscriptions.
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- Automated manual processes by developing CLI-based and Step Functions-based tools for developers, reducing scenario time from hours to minutes for 90% of cases.
- Engineered automated investigation AI agents and standardized operational procedures (SOPs), streamlining incident response for core microservices processing 50+ TPS.
- Collaborated with cross-functional teams to engineer new features on over 10 microservices and data pipelines in a business-driven environment.
- Tech Stack: Java, Scala, AWS CDK/SDK, TypeScript, bash, Step Functions, Lambda, React, Python, DynamoDB, S3, SQS/SNS, ECS.
Robotics Software Engineer | Amazon, Robotics and AI
Jun 2022 – Dec 2022 | Seattle, WABuilt the synchronous PLC communication layer for the ORCA robotic workcell over async gRPC.
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- Designed the mechanism that lets the behavior tree issue blocking commands to PLCs over async gRPC, with a race condition fix to prevent stale responses from being consumed.
- Implemented the infeed subsystem end-to-end — built the behavior tree workflow coordinating 3 parallel infeed activities (intake, multiplexer, tray load) with resource locking and retry logic.
- Tech Stack: Java, gRPC.
Staff Robotics Engineer | Seedland Research and Innovation Center
Nov 2021 – Apr 2022 | Somerville, NJDeveloped a collection pose planner for a 3D indoor mapping/modeling robot to maximize Lidar coverage.
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- Developed a collection pose planner for a 3D indoor mapping/modeling robot to maximize Lidar coverage with a reasonable number of collection poses given a 2D occupancy grid.
- Developed a 3D model viewer with smooth camera motion planned in SE(3).
- Tech Stack: C++, OpenCV, ROS, TSP Solver, PCL.
Education
- Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (Robotics) | Stevens Institute of Technology | Sep 2015 – Oct 2021
- M.S. in Control Engineering (Astronautics) | Harbin Institute of Technology | Sep 2013 – Jun 2015
- B.E. in Automation (Electrical Engineering) | Zhengzhou University | Sep 2009 – Jun 2013
Research Projects
Autonomous Mobile Robot for Guided Walking Exercise
Jan 2019 – Oct 2021Developed a ROS package for real-time estimation of a trainee's margin of stability by fusing data from an Azure Kinect on a mobile robot and instrumented insoles.
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- Contributed to the Microsoft Azure Kinect ROS Driver repository, improving timestamp accuracy, proposing solutions for negative latency, and reducing body tracking delay by 70%.
- Tech Stack: C++, Python, ROS, Kalman Filter, Sensor Fusion, IMU, RGBD SLAM, Path Planning.
Mobile Robot Formation Control
Sep 2017 – Aug 2018Designed a state-feedback formation control algorithm for a 3-robot system.
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- Implemented a simulation in V-REP where the control algorithm generated supervisory signals for a decentralized DNN to learn formation achievement using only Lidar data.
- Tech Stack: Python, Lua.