Nishant Hegde
Machine Learning Engineer | Data Scientist
Data scientist based in Rochester with 5 years of combined work experience in software engineering, machine learning and computer vision. I like building stuff, watching movies, playing video games, playing football and drumming!
Fun Fact - This year, I was introduced to rock climbing and snowboarding, which have become my latest obsessions.
Work Experience
Data Science Intern
June 2025 - PresentEagleHawk One, Inc
Built production computer vision and NLP systems including a real-time YOLOv8-based streetlight tracking pipeline and a RAG-powered emergency response training assistant. Deployed a hybrid retrieval architecture combining BM25, dense embeddings, and Zerank re-ranking with local Ollama LLM for secure offline querying.
Machine Learning Intern
August 2025 - December 2025Laboratory for Laser Energetics | University of Rochester
Developed novel deep learning architectures (U-Shaped Fourier Neural Operator and Attention Recurrent Residual U-Net) to model laser amplification processes through the OMEGA EP laser system. Optimized HPC training infrastructure across A100/H100 GPU clusters using advanced techniques like model parallelism and mixed-precision training, achieving 40% faster training and 30% reduced VRAM usage.
Software Engineer
August 2020 - May 2024Software Engineer | Toshiba (KIOXIA America, Inc)
Engineered data-driven C++ validation modules for NVMe management interfaces (SMBus/I2C) that reduced SSD operational latency by 31% and improved firmware stability by 15%. Automated CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins and built Python-based debugging tools, reducing manual QA effort by 20% while leading deployment using Agile/Scrum methodologies.
Education
Masters in Data Science
August 2025 - December 2025University of Rochester
Rochester, NY
Bachelors in Electronics and Communication Engineering
August 2016 - June 2020KLE Technological University
India