Published Jul 12, 2023
Today, July 11, marks the start of Prime Day 2023 and we're shining a spotlight on the talented individuals behind the scenes. Meet Bhavana Chandrashekhar. She has developed production software and machine learning models that serve millions of customers each day.
As a senior manager of software development at Amazon Technology Innovation, Bhavana leads a team of 35 employees who are working on one of Amazon Robotics' most critical products, recently recognized as a "Beautiful Problem" by IEEE Spectrum magazine, published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
During her eight years at Amazon, Bhavana has made significant contributions to the company's advancements in computer vision, robotics, and machine learning.
In her previous role, Bhavana delivered two critical software features that supported the world's largest robotic picking system, which picked billions of packages in 2022 according to the Robot Report.
Her leadership helped her team surpass their 2022 stretch goal, enabling a surge of holiday presents ordered in December. Bhavana has also implemented key mechanisms to prioritize program features and reduce failure modes.
Bhavana expanded her team to 35 individuals and managers, achieving over 25% diversity, equity, and inclusion representation in underrepresented fields such as computer vision, machine learning, and robotics.
She's not just an excellent brand ambassador but has also presented at major Amazon conferences, including Re: Mars and Re: Invent, and has been featured on Amazon Science. Bhavana mentors managers outside her team and leads the Women of Stow affinity group, which comprises about 20 women from the Robotic-Stow team.
Bhavana has published her work on Amazon Science and created free tutorials on YouTube that detail how Amazon builds AI-enabled perception for robotics applications. She has also presented her work at technical conferences such as the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), and the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), among others.
