Data Scientist · Tesla

Data science that ships, in whatever domain the problem lives.

Product-Focused Data Scientist Turning Models into Decisions

I build models that make high-stakes decisions in production. At Tesla, every 4680 battery cell passes through my computer vision models as the final quality gate before it goes into a vehicle. Before that, I worked on customer analytics in retail, credit and fraud risk in banking, and engine maintenance in aerospace.

Adhvaith Vijay

Experience

Five roles, one thread: turning data into decisions people act on.

  1. Jul 2024 – Present

    Senior Data Scientist · Tesla

    Own quality and risk decisions for Tesla's battery cells: the final quality gate for every 4680 cell, thermal-runaway and warranty-life forecasting, and the dashboards engineers use daily.

    10+ cell programs qualified98% recall45 engineers, 4 teams200+ hrs/week saved
  2. Sep 2023 – Jun 2024

    Data Scientist · Standard AI

    Ran in-store experiments and, with product and sales, defined the shopper-engagement metrics behind a retail analytics platform.

    +29% conversion$600K new contracts+15% revenue
  3. Jan 2023 – Sep 2023

    Cell Engineer Intern · Tesla

    CT-based defect detection and quality dashboards that drove battery cell design changes.

    +40% defect recall−20% electrolyte leaks
  4. Jun 2022 – Aug 2022

    Summer Associate, Credit Fraud Risk · JPMorgan Chase

    Small-business loan default modeling, with risk segments explained for regulators.

    +14% model lift
  5. Oct 2019 – May 2020

    Undergraduate Researcher · Rolls-Royce

    Engine-maintenance pipeline and R Shiny tool for flagging at-risk aircraft.

    3–4 hrs → under 5 min

Featured work

Public write-ups of work I've contributed to, plus my patent and papers.

Battery · Tesla

Engineering Tesla Vehicle Batteries for Safety, Durability and Longevity

How Tesla inspects every 4680 cell, using X-ray, CT scanning and AI-based defect detection, and how fleet telemetry feeds back into battery safety. This is the area my models and risk forecasting work in.

Read on tesla.com →
Retail · Standard AI

Heatmaps Are Failing Retailers. What's Next?

Why camera-by-camera heatmaps mislead retailers, and how 3D spatial reconstruction of real shopper paths gives a truer picture of in-store behavior.

Read on standard.ai →
Patent · Standard AI

Subject-tracking in a cashier-less store for spatial analytics

US 2024/0193497 A1. Co-inventor on using subject tracking in autonomous-checkout stores to improve item and shelf placement.

View patent →
Paper · Standard AI

Analyzing the Shopping Journey: Computing Shelf Browsing Visits in a Physical Retail Store

An algorithm that detects when shoppers browse a shelf from 3D-tracked trajectories, calibrated and tested across two stores. Second author (Morales, Vijay, Zanlungo, Woollard).

Read paper →
Paper · UCSD

Empirical Analysis of Efficient Fine-Tuning Methods for Large Pre-Trained Language Models

Compares BitFit and adapter modules with full fine-tuning on GLUE tasks. BitFit matches full fine-tuning with far fewer trainable parameters and stays stable with just 30% of the data. Co-author.

Read paper →
Research · CMSAC 2021

An Interpretable Method of Learning Stochastic Game Dynamics

Models a soccer ball's movement with learned potential functions to simulate matches. Captures large score differentials better than Poisson regression. Presented at the Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference.

View slides →
Project · UCLA DataRes

Make-A-Monet: Image Style Transfer with CycleGANs

Turns everyday photos into Monet-style paintings with CycleGAN and Pix2Pix, served through an interactive Plotly Dash app.

Read on Medium →

Awards

  • Tesla Spot Option GrantStock options for outstanding contributions to the company, awarded as the top performer on my team · Oct 2025
  • 1st Place, Chevron TrackRice University Datathon · 2021
  • 2nd Place, Prosperity TrackUCSD DataHacks · 2021
  • 1st Place OverallDSS Datathon for Social Good, UC Berkeley · 2020
  • 3rd Place, City Search TrackTAMU Datathon · 2020
  • 2nd Place OverallRetina AI R Datathon · 2020
  • Gandhi Memorial ScholarshipSan Diego Indian American Society · 2019

Domains

Different industries, the same core work: turn messy, high-volume data into a decision someone can trust.

🔋

Lithium-ion battery reliability

Lab stress testing, CT-scan computer vision, defect detection, and thermal-runaway risk forecasting from fleet telemetry.

Tesla
🛒

Shopper behavior analytics

3D pose data, in-store A/B testing, and layout simulation for physical retail.

Standard AI
💳

Credit & fraud risk

Loan default modeling at scale, with explanations built for regulatory audits.

JPMorgan Chase
✈️

Aerospace maintenance

Engine health algorithms and geospatial tooling for fleet maintenance.

Rolls-Royce

Toolkit

Languages & ML

PythonRSQLPySparkPyTorchscikit-learnXGBoostOpenCV

AI & Data Platforms

RAG PipelinesMCPDatabricks Vector SearchSnowflakeAWSDockerMLflow

Analytics

A/B TestingTableau

Education

M.S. Data ScienceUniversity of California, San Diego · 2024
B.S. Statistics and Data ScienceUniversity of California, Los Angeles · 2022

Let's talk

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm happy to hear about data science roles and interesting problems in any domain.