Vetted Engineering Professionals in the NYC Metro

Sophie Adams

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Senior Full-Stack Engineer specializing in event technology and interactive systems

New York, NY20y exp

“Full-stack product engineer in event tech who has owned AI-powered web products from architecture to live production, including a no-code SaaS/marketplace for event activations and real-time AI kiosk experiences. Particularly strong in building for non-technical users in high-stakes live environments, with hands-on experience across Vue/Laravel, LLM workflows, image generation pipelines, and operational reliability.”

“Backend engineer who built and evolved the real-time networking/messaging backend for a cross-platform professional networking app (Make Connexions), optimizing for low-latency delivery, privacy, and strong consistency. Experienced scaling Python/FastAPI APIs with async + Redis, and leading safe refactors via versioned endpoints, feature flags, and backward-compatible migrations; strong production auth/RLS expertise including refresh-token rotation edge cases.”

“Built and shipped an AI-powered driver ranking/assignment system at AffirmoAI using LLM intent classification + RAG over pgvector/Postgres, served via FastAPI with a React UI that explains scores. Drove measurable improvements through optimization and iteration (latency down to <800ms, adoption 60%→90%+) and implemented rigorous eval loops with dispatcher ground truth plus cold-start handling for new drivers.”

Sandipkumar Prajapati

Screened

Mid-Level Software Engineer specializing in full-stack systems and authentication

New York City, NY4y exp

“Full-stack engineer who led production modernization of a legacy, latency-sensitive application into a React + microservices platform, with heavy TypeScript backend work to improve reliability and maintainability. Has operated and scaled authentication/identity services in production, addressing peak-traffic latency spikes via database tuning and improved observability, and emphasizes idempotent, retry-safe workflow design.”

“Frontend-leaning full-stack web developer who helped build an ecommerce SaaS platform from its early foundation, including reusable CMS widgets, client-specific theming, and later modernization efforts. Stands out for successfully navigating a legacy Backbone/Marionette ecosystem, helping introduce React, Storybook, and Jest, and for hands-on accessibility audit work that brought products toward VPAT and WCAG AA/AAA compliance.”

“Full-stack AI engineer who has owned production deployments for both a voice journaling/emotional insights app and a RAG-based research assistant. Stands out for turning messy, failure-prone LLM and document pipelines into reliable user-facing systems through strong debugging, staged workflow design, and post-launch stabilization.”

“Backend engineer who has shipped both high-throughput real-time systems and production LLM/RAG features. Built a database-free, local-first messaging service (Node/Express/Socket.IO) achieving ~1,500 msgs/sec at <25ms p95, and implemented a Go-based RAG recommendation pipeline with strict JSON/schema validation, catalog grounding, fallbacks, and eval loops that cut hallucinations to ~1–2% while reducing LLM costs ~60%.”

makarand pundlik

Screened

Mid-Level Software Engineer specializing in AWS serverless and Node.js microservices

New York, NY2y exp

“Software intern at BestWork who owned an AI-powered sales performance chatbot end-to-end: React/Material UI frontend, TypeScript AWS Lambda backend, and AWS Bedrock (Llama 3) + OpenSearch knowledge base over Salesforce/HubSpot data with Slack-based weekly summaries. Worked directly with the CTO in a high-ambiguity environment, including building an audio bot from scratch just in time for a client demo, and implemented metadata-based retrieval to handle multi-team knowledge base constraints.”

Dinesh Guguloth

Screened

Mid-level Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in cloud-native microservices and GenAI

New York, NY4y exp

“Full-stack engineer with cloud and GenAI experience who has owned production features end-to-end, including a reporting dashboard optimized from 14s to 5s using query/API refactoring and monitored via AWS CloudWatch. Also productionized an OpenAI-powered chatbot using LangChain with prompt design, guardrails, and evaluation via production logs and user feedback, and has led incremental legacy-to-microservices modernization with parallel run to avoid regressions.”

Sumanth Gottipati

Screened

Mid-level Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in cloud-native microservices and FinTech

New York, NY4y exp

“At Delta Airlines, built and shipped a production LLM-powered semantic search/troubleshooting assistant over maintenance logs and operational documentation using OpenAI embeddings and a vector database. Implemented hybrid ranking, query enrichment, and structured filters to improve relevance ~35% while optimizing latency via caching and vector tuning. Also designed a scalable Kafka + AWS (Lambda/SQS) ingestion pipeline with strong reliability/observability and an eval loop using real engineer queries and human review.”

EMMANUEL ETIENNE

Screened

Engineering Manager specializing in FinTech money movement and AI-driven infrastructure

Brooklyn, NY12y exp

“Player-coach fintech engineer/engineering lead who built a deterministic payer-ID wire reconciliation system with Citi, including idempotent ingestion and webhook processing across Ruby and Go, materially reducing accounting manual work. Experienced in incident response (Plaid-related customer-impacting issue), stakeholder-driven MVP scoping for ACH status visibility, and delivery acceleration via infrastructure templating (EC2) and standardized Magento project setups.”

George Stathopoulos

Screened

Entry-level Software Engineer specializing in full-stack web development and applied systems work

New York City, NY0y exp

“Full-stack developer with hands-on experience building an end-to-end automated trading platform that combines web scraping, relational data storage, Flask/React architecture, and LLM-based decisioning via Google Vertex AI. Also brings production experience at CALEC, where they contributed frontend improvements including welcome-page redesigns, multilingual support, and accessibility-related fixes.”

“Backend/data engineer with production experience building Python FastAPI services and AWS-native data pipelines. Has delivered containerized and serverless workloads (ECS/EKS/Lambda) with Terraform-based IaC, strong reliability patterns (JWT/RBAC, retries/circuit breakers, observability), and AWS Glue ETL into S3/Redshift. Demonstrated measurable SQL performance wins (40–50s to <4s) and owned real pipeline incidents through detection, mitigation, and prevention.”

“Backend/platform engineer with production experience building a Python SDK over a microservices ecosystem, emphasizing reliability (JWT auth, retries/timeouts, custom exceptions) and integration testing. Has delivered AWS EKS microservices with Jenkins+Helm CI/CD, strong secrets/config separation using AWS Secrets Manager, and set up Datadog APM/deployment/change monitoring. Also modernized legacy VB applications to C#/.NET WPF via incremental migration with parity testing and stakeholder sign-off.”

“Built a demo-live LangGraph/LangSmith LLM agent that translates natural language into SQL against a self-built MLB statistics database, using a vector-store knowledge base of example queries. Focused on predictable orchestration via conditional nodes, YAML-driven behaviors, and tool-gated function calling, with testing via LangSmith and Python scripts.”

“Built and launched “Language AI,” a Next.js/TypeScript app that clones a user’s voice (via ElevenLabs) to deliver language lessons in their own voice, using Supabase for auth/Postgres/storage and hosting backend on Render. Post-launch, identified ElevenLabs voice-clone limits after initial users and reworked the pipeline to store audio assets and delete clones to support more concurrent users; also added Google auth to improve adoption. Previously worked in a high-growth startup environment (Study Park) taking concepts from ideation to production.”

Filmon Tesfay

Screened

Senior Full-Stack Developer specializing in cloud-native FinTech and AI platforms

New York, NY8y exp

“Full-stack engineer with strong production ownership: built and operated a real-time transaction monitoring/fraud-alerting system using Java Spring Boot, Kafka, Docker, and AWS with CI/CD. Demonstrates metrics-driven operations (latency, stability, consumer lag, true/false positives) and reliability patterns for integrations (idempotency, retries/backoff, DLQs, reconciliation/backfills), plus modern React/TypeScript + Node/Postgres architecture experience.”

Sanjana Akula

Screened

Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in cloud-native microservices and FinTech

New York, NY5y exp

“Front-end engineer with experience at Optum and Wells Fargo maintaining internal React/Angular component libraries and design-system-aligned UI modules used across multiple apps. Known for stabilizing shared libraries via semantic versioning, Jest test automation, and high-quality documentation, plus measurable performance wins (≈40% faster dashboard loads) through profiling-driven React and API optimizations.”

Oyku Yamakoglu

Screened

Senior Game Developer specializing in interactive systems and real-time graphics

New York, NY6y exp

“Lead Programmer and Technical Artist on the 3D isometric boss-battler RPG Highrollers, where they owned core gameplay and technical architecture for an 11-person team. They stand out for building modular Unity/C# systems that improved iteration speed, plus adjacent experience in real-time vision/inference pipelines and small-scale multiplayer using Photon and Unity Netcode.”

“Early-career full-stack builder who created an AI interview-prep platform used by 200+ students, tested it with a 25-student study group, and earned recognition through the CUNY Startup accelerator, including prize money and local college adoption. Has also shipped compliance-sensitive AI products in healthcare marketing and operational tools like invoice approval systems, showing unusual breadth across AI, UX, and backend systems.”

“Audio engineer with 10 years of experience using Pro Tools for sound design and music/SFX editing to picture. Has delivered educational longform content for Nearpod, including culturally specific music choices (e.g., oud-driven Middle Eastern cues) and prioritizes dialogue intelligibility through ducking and mix adjustments; typically turns projects around in 1–2 days using templates.”