CV

Education

B.Tech. (Honours) in Computer Science and Engineering
- IIIT Hyderabad
- Graduated: May 2025
- GPA: 9.80/10.0 (Institute Gold Medalist)
Relevant Courses: Mobile Robotics, Safe AI, Computer Vision, Statistical Methods in AI, Distributed Systems

June 2025 - Present: Software Engineer
- Stripe (Commerce Systems)
- Duties included: Engineering record completeness guarantees for a fee reporting system processing over 400 billion records daily; Rolled out a unified Cost Management page, migrating multiple legacy product surfaces.
May 2024 - June 2024: Summer Intern
- D.E. Shaw and Co. (Front Office R&D Tech)
- Duties included: Engineered one-step deployment modules for local clones of remote data-processing nodes; Reduced developer debugging time by 50% by eliminating multi-hour remote debugging.
Aug 2023 - May 2025: Undergraduate Researcher
- Robotics Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad
- Duties included: Focused on bridging foundation models with classical robotics pipelines for localization and navigation; Led contributions to IROS 2025 paper, designing core global localization logic; Contributed to CoRL 2025 paper by integrating a topometric map with a learned controller; Mentored three undergraduate students in robotics and ROS.
- Supervisors: K Madhava Krishna, Sourav Garg
Aug 2024 - Dec 2024: Supervised Program for Alignment Research Mentee
- Duties included: Contributed to an ICLR 2025 AI safety paper on verifying LLM forecaster consistency; Engineered the benchmark dataset pipeline, building an asynchronous multi-stage LLM system to process and generate forecasting questions.
- Supervisor: Daniel Paleka

P. Paul*, V. Bhat*, T. Salian, M. Omama, K. M. Jatavallabhula, N. Arulselvan, and K. M. Krishna, “Sparseloc: Sparse open-set landmark-based global localization for autonomous navigation,” in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Oral Presentation, 2025.
S. Garg*, D. Craggs*, V. Bhat, L. Mares, S. Podgorski, M. Krishna, F. Dayoub, and I. Reid, “Objectreact: Learning object-relative control for visual navigation,” in Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2025.
D. Paleka*, A. P. Sudhir*, A. Alvarez, V. Bhat, A. Shen, E. Wang, and F. Tramèr, “Consistency checks for language model forecasters,” in International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Oral Presentation, 2025.
A. Chavan, V. Agrawal, V. Bhat, S. Chittawar, S. Srivastava, C. Arora, and K. M. Krishna, “Towards Global Localization using Multi-Modal Object-Instance Re-Identification,” in *Advances in Robotics (AIR), Oral Presentation, 2025.

Teaching Assistant, Software Engineering (Jan 2025 - May 2025)
- IIIT Hyderabad
- Designed and graded assignments on software architecture patterns.
- Led tutorial sessions for 120+ students on Object-Oriented Programming and software design patterns.
Teaching Assistant, Operating Systems & Networks (Aug 2023 - Dec 2023)
- IIIT Hyderabad
- Spearheaded the design of the final course project: implementing a Network File System from scratch.
- Contributed to the design of a C-shell project, mentoring students on low-level systems programming.

Technical Head, E-Cell (2024)
- Led problem statement scoping for Megathon (one of Hyderabad’s largest hackathons) with stakeholders including the Government of Telangana and Qualcomm.
Editor, Ping! (Campus Magazine) (2023)
- Authored articles highlighting campus-alumni operational disconnects; edited and managed content authored by other writers.

Awarded the IIITH Gold Medal by IIIT Hyderabad for graduating with the highest GPA in my batch (2025).
Admitted into Institute Research List by IIIT Hyderabad for making contributions to robotics research (2025).
Ranked 610th in JEE Main and 877th in JEE Advanced among 939,000 candidates (2021).