Hi, I'm Deepak Sharma

I am still figuring out what I truly love to do. Along the way, I have learnt a few things about myself.

I love working at the intersection of customer need, product design, and engineering. I have been told I am good at seeing around corners, and I love obsessing over details of things I build. Through my work at FlexDex, University of Michigan, Apple, and lately Doordash Labs, I have learned that I need creative freedom and the highest level of responsibility that's practically possible, to create the impact I believe I owe to the team! I love building things that I or others around me need, and lately I am obsessed with building web tools for hardware engineers. I feel I will run out of time before I get to build everything I want to!

I am 34.044336576 years old and live in Oakland, CA with my wife Anurekha. I previously lived in SF South Bay and Ann Arbor, and was born in New Delhi. I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering from University of Michigan — Ann Arbor (M.S) and Indian Institute of Technology — Mandi (B.S).

I am highly passionate about two fields: healthcare and education. I chose University of Michigan because I wanted to join a medical device startup — FlexDex Surgical, which was then (in 2014) incubated at the University of Michigan in Prof. Shorya Awtar's lab. I (naively) chose an expensive but highly rigorous school! I then joined FlexDex as a founding team member and worked for 5+ years through the launch of multiple products. FlexDex has been used to perform minimally invasive surgery in 20+ countries for over 5,000 procedures on kids, adults, animals, and by the military. This remains the most impactful work I have done so far. FlexDex was recently sold to LivsMed in 2025.

I moved to San Francisco after 7+ years in Michigan to join Apple as Product Design Engineer. At Apple, I really enjoyed working with industrial designers, fellow engineers, ops team members, and most importantly the China and Japan teams! My notable work there was leading the Product Design and Engineering for TechWoven Case from concept to mass production. Over my 4 years at Apple, I realized I feel most at home in the scrappy, early-stage startup world and thought of starting my own company. While going through that process, I came across Doordash Labs, which seemed like the right place to create meaningful impact at scale, make lifelong connections, and hone my skills in mechatronics engineering. I joined the team as Hardware Engineer in August 2025 and have been working here since, on the Autonomy platform.

Other than building engineering projects, I love singing, playing pickleball, and talking to founders I can help!

Thanks for reading this far. Please feel free to reach me at hi@deepakbuilds.com or at other socials, if I can help or if you'd love to connect over mutual interests.