Vetted Director of Engineerings in the Bay Area

“Senior engineering leader in healthcare AI who combines org scaling with deep hands-on architecture work. At DriveHealth.ai, they helped evolve isolated workflows into a production-grade intelligent platform, standardizing a shared RAG+DCE architecture while leading teams of 50+ across engineering, AI, platform, QA, and DevOps.”

“Engineering leader focused on large-scale enterprise SaaS and MDM platforms, with experience modernizing monoliths into microservices, improving reliability, and scaling systems to support 15M devices across AWS and Azure. Stands out for combining deep platform architecture work with strong org-building: managed teams up to 45 globally and built a 0-to-1 platform services team to 22 people in under a year.”

Nilesh Dixit

Screened

Executive AI engineering leader specializing in agentic AI and enterprise platforms

San Francisco, CA24y exp

“Bay Area engineering leader and startup co-founder with a rare mix of deep hands-on architecture experience, large-scale people leadership, and cross-functional product ownership. He helped launch GE Digital's industrial IoT efforts, holds multiple patents in the space, has scaled teams to 60-70 people, and has led both enterprise platform modernization and AI startup product development.”

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.”

Michael Yudanin

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in AI/ML and enterprise software

San Ramon, CA19y exp

“Engineering leader with 20+ years of experience who still codes daily, currently directing AI-driven knowledge management systems at eGain. He stands out for combining large-scale people leadership with deep technical ownership of LLM/NLI pipelines and for a track record of turning complex operational problems into high-impact systems, including a manufacturing platform that boosted throughput 4x and expanded across 11 plants.”

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.”

Garretson Beebe

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in cloud, data, and AI platforms

San Francisco, CA17y exp

“Engineering leader with deep product-platform experience across Splunk and Alation, including owning the multi-year SPL2 initiative at Splunk from customer research and architecture decisions through execution planning and org scaling. Also grew Alation's Data Analytics organization from 8 to 22 engineers across three squads, combining hands-on technical problem solving with strong managerial systems.”

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.”

Ravi Gairola

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in AI platforms and cloud infrastructure

San Francisco, CA15y exp

“Engineering leader and hands-on architect with experience managing three teams spanning product, internal tooling, and ML, while also building AI chat and digital twin systems. Particularly notable for a patented memory architecture used to impersonate users in meetings/chat, plus prior delivery of a consumer digital payments system for Razer under tight deadlines and heavy tech debt.”