I'm Nuralem Abizov —
a robotics & software engineer building intelligent machines.

Robotics / software engineer with 10+ years of experience and an open-source contributor to Nvidia IsaacLab, Go2 Omniverse SDK, and the Unitree Go2 SDK. I design end-to-end autonomous systems — perception, locomotion, and control — and build resilient backend & fintech infrastructure that runs in production.

Nuralem Abizov

Experience

Where I've built things

10+ years across robotics R&D, autonomy, machine learning, and fintech engineering.

Ec

Tech Lead

Ecoo Ltd — Zug, Switzerland (Remote) 2025 – 2026

Next-gen payments & tokenized loyalty platform

Led engineering for a customizable payments/coupon platform. Launched an L2 coin on Etherlink (Tezos) for a loyalty program serving Switzerland's largest health insurer — reaching 42,355 holders and 167,819 on-chain transfers, ranking #2 by holders in the Tezos (Etherlink) network. Source ↗

Re

Chief Technology Officer

Re:start Fintech — Austin, TX, USA (Remote) 2022 – 2026

Grew from Senior Engineer → Dev Lead → CTO

Established two American neobanks from the ground up and built production-grade infrastructure for complex financial environments, leading engineering teams across the US and Europe over a multi-year operation.

A&M

Research Collaboration

Texas A&M University 2024 – 2025

Memory-driven visual navigation & robotic swarms

Co-authored research on MLLM memory-driven visual navigation (Unitree GO1) and blockchain-managed robotic swarms with Hybrid ACO. Work featured by Texas A&M Engineering ("Smarter than your average dog").

Az

Robotics Engineer — Amazon FAR (Consulting)

Amazon — SF Bay Area 2025

Frontier AI & Robotics

Consulted on advanced robotics problems alongside leading experts in the field.

Le

Lecturer

Intl. Engineering Technological University — Almaty 2021 – 2024

Part-time job

Taught 1000+ students in robotics, machine learning, algorithms & data structures, mobile development, system reliability, and operating systems.

Qr

Head of R&D / Tech Lead

Quant Robotics — Almaty 2021 – 2022

End-to-end robotic welding on the edge of science

  • Designed an end-to-end robotic beam-welding system delivering 1.5× faster production and 60% fewer defects compared to human welders.
  • Built a microservice architecture that accelerated planning algorithms 16×.
  • Solved geometry-analysis problems (Tekla + ROS), boosting team research speed +50%.
  • Created a 3D analyzer for Tekla — "Best Developer Project Kazakhstan", Tekla BIM Awards 2021.
Hb

Senior Software Engineer

Halyk Bank — Almaty 2020 – 2021

RPA & automation at Kazakhstan's largest bank

Built a commercially successful RPA studio ( faster robot development) and a Forex trading robot approving 100+ transactions/day (~$100M), cutting approval time from 15 to 2 minutes.

Ds

Software Engineer

Dorsnab — Almaty 2019 – 2020

Computer vision & industrial automation

Built a computer-vision system for bitumen quantity control (−30% material use), a semi-automatic filling conveyor (3.6× throughput), and industrial steam (1.2 MW) & thermal-oil (420 kW) boilers from scratch.

Hz

Teaching Assistant — AI Lab (MIL)

Hangzhou Dianzi University — China 2017 – 2019

Machine learning & humanoid balancing research

Created and taught "Introduction to Machine Learning"; supervised lab AI projects including a humanoid balancing on an unstable platform using neural networks.

Engineering work

Projects

Selected systems I've designed and built — from academic research to commercial robotics and industrial engineering.

Scientific & Research

Unitree Go2 Air → Wheeled Platform

Converted a $1,600 Unitree Go2 Air into a wheeled version — a configuration that normally costs around $16,000 from the manufacturer. Built and validated in Nvidia Isaac Lab, turning a legged platform into a high-mobility wheeled robot for faster traversal on flat and urban terrain.

  • Go2 Air base
  • Isaac Lab
  • Wheeled mod
  • ~10× cost savings

Humanoid Balancing with Neural Networks

Master's thesis work: designed and built a biped humanoid robot from scratch and developed a balancing control algorithm powered by a neural network — without PID controllers. The system learns to stabilize the platform on an unstable surface, combining mechanical design, embedded control, and machine-learning-based balance recovery in real time.

  • Master's thesis
  • No PID
  • Neural network control
  • Humanoid hardware

Fully Automated Robot Warehouse

Bachelor's diploma project: designed and built a fully automated mini-warehouse with autonomous mobile robots — inspired by Amazon warehouse robotics. The system coordinates multiple robots for item storage, retrieval, and transport across the warehouse floor, demonstrating end-to-end automation from task scheduling to physical execution.

  • Bachelor's thesis
  • Multi-robot fleet
  • Amazon-inspired
  • Full automation

Commercial

Steam Boiler Design & Assembly

Designed and assembled industrial steam boiler systems from scratch — including a 1.2 MW steam boiler and a 420 kW thermal-oil boiler. Full cycle: thermal engineering, mechanical layout, piping, electrical control panels, and on-site commissioning. Saved around 60% of the budget compared to purchasing ready-made units from manufacturers.

  • 1.2 MW steam
  • 420 kW thermal oil
  • Full assembly
  • −60% cost

Autonomous Delivery Rover

A last-mile delivery robot built from scratch — hardware platform plus a Level-4 autopilot written and validated in the CARLA simulator using Unreal Engine 4. Engineered for the lowest bill-of-materials cost on the market while keeping an all-weather perception stack.

  • Level-4 autopilot
  • CARLA + UE4
  • Small-series production
  • 360° perception

Quadruped Delivery Courier

A legged delivery platform that moves seamlessly between indoor and outdoor environments, climbs steps, and handles constrained spaces that stop wheeled robots. Built on a Unitree Go2 chassis with a modular sensor array.

  • Legged mobility
  • Unitree Go2 platform
  • Modular sensors

Manipulation & Autonomy — Isaac Lab

Reinforcement-learning and control experiments for real-world interaction tasks such as autonomous door opening — perception, manipulation, and locomotion trained in Nvidia Isaac Lab.

  • Isaac Lab / RL
  • Manipulation
  • Locomotion

Quant Robotics — Autonomous Welding

An end-to-end robotic beam-welding system that boosts production speed by 1.5× and cuts defects by 60% compared to human welders. Included an award-winning 3D analyzer for Tekla (Trimble), integrated with ROS.

  • 1.5× faster
  • −60% defects
  • 16× planning

🔒 There are more interesting projects under NDA that I can't show publicly — only the work I'm allowed to share is listed here.

Education

Academic background

M.Sc. — Computer Science & Technology

Hangzhou Dianzi University, China

2016 – 2019 · GPA 3.75 / 4

B.Sc. — Computer Software & Engineering

Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Almaty

2012 – 2016 · GPA 3.6 / 4

Research

Publications

Peer-reviewed and preprint work in robotics, autonomy, and multi-robot systems.

01
SLAMOff-road robotsSurvey

A Review of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Methods for Off-Road Mobile Robots

ETASR — Engineering, Technology & Applied Science Research

A survey of SLAM for off-road mobile robots, categorizing LiDAR-based, visual, multi-sensor-fusion, and learning/semantic approaches. Analyzes accuracy, drift, robustness, and efficiency, and identifies research gaps toward hybrid, computation-aware SLAM and standardized off-road benchmarks.

View publication ↗
02
MLLMVisual navigationUnitree GO1

A Walk to Remember: MLLM Memory-Driven Visual Navigation

Texas A&M University · ResearchGate

A memory-based navigation framework for terrestrial robots using a customized multimodal LLM to interpret visual inputs and generate navigation commands. A Unitree GO1 reuses previously traversed paths to reduce re-exploration, with a hybrid deliberation + reactive controller improving path retracing.

View publication ↗
03
Multi-robotBlockchainPath planning

Hybrid ACO for Blockchain-managed Robotic Swarms

ResearchGate

A dynamic multi-robot mapping framework combining blockchain-based swarm contracts for decentralized task allocation with a Hybrid Ant Colony Optimization algorithm for path planning. Deployed LiDAR-equipped Unitree Go2 robots in cooperative and competitive modes to map sub-areas with verifiable full coverage.

View publication ↗

Contact

Let's build something ambitious

Open to robotics engineering, autonomy, and applied-ML roles and collaborations. The fastest way to reach me is email.