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.