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%+.”

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.”

“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.”

Shruti Krishnagiri

Screened

Executive Engineering Leader & Technical Founder specializing in AI automation platforms

San Francisco Bay Area, California20y exp

“Founder/CTO who built and shipped a consumer subscription-bundling platform end-to-end (architecture, implementation, testing) and scaled it to thousands of customers and major partners. Previously led a major reliability overhaul at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for a Google-Docs-like ed-tech product—boosted observability, introduced incident management, and migrated to a Docker-based scalable architecture. Heavy user of AI tools (Cursor/Claude) for development, testing, and code review, with a strong bias toward lightweight, fast-moving execution.”

Blake Thomas

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in AI and EdTech platforms

San Mateo, CA21y exp

“Has been on the receiving end of a VC investment and took responsibility for significant parts of the diligence process, drawing parallels to hands-on work with security compliance and auditors. Approaches entrepreneurship and idea selection with a structured framework (leverage, resources/runway, passion) and a sustainability-first mindset around risk and personal/family well-being.”

Devang Shah

Screened

Executive AI and Cloud transformation leader specializing in enterprise GTM and product engineering

San Jose, CA23y exp

“Candidate is interested in building horizontal AI infrastructure capabilities, specifically around observability, and brings exposure to investor evaluation dynamics from experience at PE-backed firm WinWire. They appear strongly motivated by entrepreneurial ownership, creativity, and the ability to drive and pivot ideas in a venture studio or startup environment.”

Adam Safran

Screened

Engineering Director specializing in platform modernization, microservices, and cloud reliability

Pleasant Hill, CA26y exp

“Former founder (ran a custom web development shop in Los Angeles) with extensive startup experience and a solid working understanding of the VC ecosystem. Helped build and scale a team at Turo from founding member to ~10 people, and is motivated by ownership, impact, and originating ideas—interested in the venture studio model and disciplined about rapid validation and execution.”

Rob Wlaschin

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Director-level Engineering Manager specializing in AI platforms, FinTech, and Healthtech

Santa Clara, CA24y exp

“Serial entrepreneur building three distinct products: a context-aware AI chatbot, a connected TV companion-screen platform with an implementation client, and gamerogue.net, a mobile-optimized web-based virtual tabletop marketplace currently seeking funding. Brings hands-on fundraising experience, familiarity with the VC/accelerator ecosystem including YC, and a notably pragmatic approach to validating ideas based on existing market demand rather than speculative adoption.”