Vetted Engineering Professionals in the Bay Area

Thazim Banu Shaffee

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Engineering Manager specializing in payments, risk, and high-scale distributed systems

San Jose, CA14y exp

“Engineering leader/player-coach on a risk core transaction platform (payments/branded checkout) who led major migrations from a monolithic stack to microservices, including API contract redesign and performance improvements (reported ~500ms latency reduction). Experienced running high-stakes production incidents (upgrade-related outage/degradation) end-to-end with RCA and rollout-process changes, and has accelerated delivery via documentation/tooling (audit sign-off cycle reduced from ~3 sprints to ~1).”

“Project lead who partners with PM and customers to gather requirements, adjust project plans, and deliver new functionality that drives customer satisfaction and revenue. Has experience building features end-to-end and presenting successful technical demos to engineering and management audiences; no stated experience with LLM/agentic systems.”

“Embodied AI/robotics-focused ML engineer who built a real-time assistive Braille device by coupling transformer OCR with an Arduino-controlled electromechanical Braille cell, solving tight latency and hardware-integration constraints. Has recent work on geometry-grounded world models and a real-time 4D reconstruction foundation model (Any4D), and delivered measurable impact at Voxel AI by building a scalable headless simulation + synthetic data pipeline that improved a safety-critical algorithm’s recall by ~16%.”

“Google backend engineer with strong experience in large-scale identity, membership, and access-control systems. Notable work includes reconciling customer IDs across 2B+ roster records and leading a 0-to-1 Drive sharing feature to classify external users as crossover members, with a strong emphasis on correctness, rollout safety, and low-latency service design.”

“Meta engineer who has shipped both user-facing full-stack product work and internal AI agent systems at production scale. Most notably built AuditFixer, an agentic remediation pipeline that fully automated audit-fix workflows, cut turnaround from 6-7 hours to under 1 hour, and has already produced 30+ landed diffs, while also owning the Llama API evaluation flow launched for thousands of developers.”

“Solutions/implementation-focused engineer with payments expertise (Adyen headless Magento integrations, 3DS components) who also builds and troubleshoots agentic LLM workflows using the OpenAI Agents SDK. Experienced in pre-sales technical validation and in tailoring live demos/workshops—e.g., pivoted a Quantum Metric workshop from custom JavaScript instrumentation to no-code analytics based on audience needs.”

Jingfei Xu

Screened

Intern/Junior Software Engineer specializing in AI/ML and cloud-based systems

Mountain View, CA0y exp

“Embedded/robotics software engineer with Hyundai Motors experience who owned an AI-driven perception validation pipeline using a Transformer-based approach to generate stable synthetic in-cabin audio for autonomy/ASR testing, cutting downstream testing time by 50%+. Has hands-on ROS integration (IMU sensor streaming, inference, control nodes), MQTT-based distributed messaging, and cloud/container deployment experience (Docker, Node/Express, AWS, CI/CD).”

“Senior software engineering leader with 20+ years of management exposure who has alternated between IC and director-level roles, leading teams of up to 25 across AI platform, analytics, Salesforce, and systems software projects. Particularly compelling for roles needing both technical depth and organizational leadership: they have architected systems themselves, built teams in new geographies, and coordinated platform, AI/data, and consumer engineering groups to deliver successful turnkey AI solutions.”

“Meta engineer who improved a critical revenue estimation dataset pipeline that was arriving ~6 days late—diagnosed via raw logs/lineage, redesigned legacy scans to only process the needed window, and shipped validation plus freshness/lag dashboards. Delivered ~50% latency reduction (to ~3 days) and regained adoption by running old/new pipelines in parallel with gated cutover and evidence-based customer communication. Applies incident-response rigor to real-time LLM/agentic workflow debugging and regularly runs developer demos/workshops.”

George Liu

Screened

Intern Software Engineer specializing in full-stack, backend, and AI agent systems

Fremont, CA1y exp

“Backend engineer with Tesla experience who redesigned vehicle registration into a step-based, region-configured workflow across 4–5 microservices, enabling partial saves and reducing customer drop-off. Has hands-on experience scaling and securing Python/FastAPI APIs (OAuth2/JWT, CORS), migrating cold data from MySQL to MongoDB via Kubernetes CronJobs, and implementing RBAC/RLS with Supabase + Postgres.”

“Robotics engineer who helped bootstrap Meta’s humanoid robotics effort, building simulation training and deployment infrastructure for vision-language-action (VLA) models. Evaluated multiple physics backends (Bullet, MuJoCo, Isaac, internal) to minimize sim-to-real gap and addressed control-loop frequency mismatches via sequence optimization/MPC-like approaches and trajectory-output modifications. Published research that contributed a new addition to ROS 2 and has built ROS2 node stacks spanning control, perception, teleop, tactile sensing, and imaging.”

“AWS engineering manager leading delivery for an end-to-end encrypted communications product (calling/messaging/screen sharing), including shipping read receipts with full design/engineering/QA ownership. Demonstrated strong customer-driven problem solving (offline/mission users enrollment via admin one-time codes with account allowlisting) and reliability improvements (data retention bot crash RCA, monitoring/notification, and high-volume test simulation).”

Pankaj Goyal

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in FinTech, IAM, and AI/ML platforms

SF Bay Area, CA22y exp

“Player-coach backend leader at PostLo who led a major backend architecture upgrade to enable AI-driven features by separating transactional systems from AI workloads (vector embeddings/image validation) and adding async processing for heavy jobs. Also owned production reliability improvements (query/index optimization, workload isolation, monitoring and load testing) and translated an ambiguous retention goal into a shipped cashback rewards feature with auditable transactions.”

“Engineer with deep hands-on experience building Square's billing and payments platform in a startup-like environment inside a larger company. They drove a high-stakes PostgreSQL migration, built merchant-facing full-stack features across React/TypeScript, Go, and Python, and designed for PCI-compliant, high-throughput financial workflows with strong observability and production rigor.”

“Early-stage full-stack engineer who built Dokai's core web spreadsheet product and key AI features with just a two-engineer team. They combine strong product ownership with practical LLM integration experience, including reducing onboarding from a week to five minutes and solving difficult reliability and memory issues in production.”

veera krishna chaitanya Arepalli

Screened

Mid-level Full-Stack Engineer specializing in AdTech and FinTech

Menlo Park, CA5y exp

“Meta product engineer with strong ad-tech experience who owned monetization and optimization features across Instagram Boost on mobile and web. They combine product analysis, experimentation, and full-stack execution, citing $9.8M/year from an upsell feature and $43K/day from feeding IG-to-WhatsApp lead signals into ad targeting. Also built an internal LLM-powered analytics agent to automate adoption-rate analysis for product teams.”