Vetted Director of Engineerings in the Bay Area

“Engineering leader who drove Lightroom Mobile’s roadmap at Adobe by enforcing reuse of Photoshop imaging tech to deliver RAW, non-destructive mobile editing with full Creative Cloud compatibility. In startup environments, has repeatedly scaled and professionalized engineering orgs (career ladders, evaluation systems, delivery process) and led high-stakes cloud/platform transformations—migrating off Heroku and consolidating fragmented AWS/GCP usage into a single GCP platform—improving reliability, deploy speed, and cutting cloud costs by 20%+.”

“Senior engineering leader with deep hands-on architecture experience across fintech and enterprise software. At DriveWealth, he led a major backend replatform for a brokerage platform handling 10M+ trades per day, combining event-driven design, Kinesis/Kafka, and regulatory-grade accuracy; at TIBCO, he built a Kubernetes-based API management product from near scratch into a successful revenue-generating offering.”

Jim Woodroffe

Screened

Executive Engineering Leader (CTO/VP) specializing in scaling platforms, AI, and cloud infrastructure

San Francisco, CA24y exp

“Entrepreneurial operator who previously built an AI context layer for personal communication/relationships and has worked with a New York-based venture group to evaluate early-stage ideas from both technical and business angles. Currently exploring broad startup opportunities and collaborating with 2–3 early-stage companies, with a structured approach to assessing market outcomes, competition, and team fit.”

“Fintech and AI product engineer who has owned major production rollouts, including Lending Club's banking-arm launch, and has since built LLM-powered decision systems for finance and climate use cases. Particularly strong in combining stakeholder management with pragmatic architecture choices like observability, deterministic pipeline design, RAG, and document-to-structured-data workflows.”

“Healthcare product leader with deep oncology and pharma experience who has built both foundational clinical data platforms and AI-powered patient engagement workflows. Particularly notable for combining rigorous data standardization, LLM evaluation/guardrail design, and human-centered communication changes that drove measurable medication refill and adherence improvements. Also teaches AI to product managers and business analysts, bringing a pragmatic, education-first view of human-centered AI adoption.”

Philip Kearney

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in embedded systems, IoT, and wireless networking

San Francisco Bay Area, CA34y exp

“Former Apple employee who worked with Steve Jobs in the early 2000s and is now looking to join startups as a CTO partner to non-technical founders. Brings a thoughtful, skeptical lens on VC-backed startup execution, emphasizing technical feasibility, real product-market fit, and mission-driven teams solving meaningful problems.”

“Engineering leader with deep hands-on experience across eCommerce, retail commerce, regulatory tech, and IP PBX systems, including building a no-code web application platform. Has managed organizations of up to 65 people while staying involved in architecture and production debugging, and cites measurable impact such as 50% efficiency gains, 100% productivity improvement, and 90% error reduction through partner/API remediation.”

“Engineering leader with experience at Vertex and Salesforce, combining org leadership with hands-on architecture work. He led a 40-person team through execution and quality improvements, drove legacy modernization and SaaS transition, and launched a 0-to-1 voice capability in CRM while also applying AI to code migration and developer productivity.”

“Director of Engineering at Proofpoint for 8 years, leading architecture and integration of Java microservices within a detection platform. Demonstrates pragmatic delivery leadership—incurring short-term cost to meet launch deadlines, then systematically paying down technical debt and optimizing AWS spend—plus a disciplined, long-horizon approach to backward-compatible API/schema evolution across many dependent services.”

“Engineering leader (12+ years Director, 17 years lead) focused on developer productivity and platform/framework work across Oracle, PlayStation, Workday, and CafePress. Notable for building distributed teams from scratch and delivering high-impact platform architecture—e.g., re-architected PlayStation’s upload pipeline to support 500GB–5TB submissions using browser-to-AWS chunked uploads with SNS/SQS and deduplication/resume support.”

“Engineering leader (Director of Development) with hands-on cloud and product experience who builds business-aligned technology roadmaps and scales teams. Delivered an enterprise cloud-migration enabler at UHG by implementing AD authentication and Terraform-based IaC for custom VM images while meeting 90-day InfoSec patch/rotation requirements, and drove a 20% lift in user consumption/retention by designing an interactive branded media portal experience for Sunkist.”