Meet the Ware Force: Tori Joshi

As a young company, hiring the right people is crucial to success. We’re proud of the culture we’re building at Ware, and want you to meet the people behind our warehouse automation technology. These are the people that make it happen.

For our latest Meet the Ware Force article, we spoke with Tori Joshi, one of our deployment engineers. Keep reading to learn more about Tori, why she joined Ware, and what’s involved in a warehouse drone deployment.
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Name: Tori Joshi
Role: Deployment Engineer
Department: Operations
Location: San Francisco

Q: Can you start by telling us a little bit about your background?

A: I’m originally from Suwanee, Georgia, which is a suburb just outside of Atlanta. I studied at Rice University in Houston and I have a degree in mechanical engineering and a minor in engineering design. 

While I was in college, I had internships in the HVAC and automation spheres. After graduating, I was in ABB’s LEAD Engineering rotational program where I had three positions over the span of two years. I spent the first eight months as a manufacturing engineer in the Motion division, eight months as a sales engineer for the Electrification division, and eight months as a design engineer in the Robotics division. It was a great program that gave me a ton of really cool experience and it made me realize I wanted to stay in the robotics industry, which is how I found Ware.
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Q: What attracted you to joining Ware?

A: I was really excited about working for a company where I had more autonomy and also a lot more visibility to everyone in the company. I get to work with our CTO, Joe, on a day-to-day basis. Learning from him and the rest of my team has been great. And… I get to work with flying robots every day, which is really cool.
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Q: What does a typical day look like as a deployment engineer?

A: A typical day starts off with our deployment team stand up, where we discuss what we’re focusing on for the day and week ahead. After that, I usually work on planning deployment trips, coordinating these with our customers, and working on our mapping process. Right now, I’m actually working on coding flight paths for our customers so that our drones know how to scan inventory fully autonomously.

If I’m on a deployment trip, it involves a combination of working with our customers at their site, setting up our hardware, and recording their facility layout to create that autonomous flight path. This can include completing mapping worksheets to record their rack nomenclature, taking 3D LiDAR scans of the warehouse, setting up our nests and markers, and the rest of the prep work to get a customer ready to fly. Then, we come back to the WareHouse HQ to unload and process the information we’ve collected.
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Q: What do you think is next for the supply chain industry?

A: I definitely think we're going to see more automation in warehousing, and fast. Automation is already huge in the supply chain but I think it’s going to be more widely adopted in warehouses. 

I’ve liked the trend I’ve seen in the manufacturing industry in the past few years. When I interned in this space, I was asked to look into how we could improve process efficiency in order to reduce labor hours and headcount. But, the pandemic shifted things and now, companies want to know how to use the employees they have more effectively. We’re not talking about replacing humans with robots. The question is more focused on “how do we get people and robots to work together?” That’s a mindset I like a lot more. It’s also more realistic because people are working labor intensive jobs, and automation can help with some of that. Whether that means more automated drones taking inventory in warehouses or more automated moving robots (AMRs) or automated guided vehicles (AGVs) to deliver things to people. From my perspective that’s where I see the industry headed.
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Q: Final question, what do you like to do in your spare time?

A: I love going to the theatre, I will watch anything I can get my hands on. I’m trying to see as much as I can - whether it’s Broadway or independent theatre, I’m there. I actually used to be a theater director in college, and while I was there I won a playwriting contest where the play I wrote was produced into a full audio recording. I’d love to get back into that and do theater production alongside my job at Ware. 

Outside of that I like to read, hang out with friends, try new restaurants, and sightsee.

Want to know more about working at Ware? Visit our careers page to read more about our company initiatives.