Vetted Director of Engineerings in California

“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.”

“Senior Microsoft engineering leader who has led globally distributed orgs of up to 250 engineers while staying deeply technical in large-scale platform architecture, reliability, and AI systems. Notable work includes modernizing Teams infrastructure serving massive global scale and incubating an internal AI pair-programmer/knowledge-graph platform over 650M lines of code, plus helping launch foundational Copilot search and retrieval APIs.”

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.”

Sergey Pustovit

Screened

Director-level Data Platform & Analytics Engineering Leader specializing in distributed systems

Irvine, CA31y exp

“Entrepreneurially minded builder focused on proving architecture concepts via minimal demo prototypes for marketing. Has hands-on experience improving an A/B experimentation framework by interviewing stakeholders, identifying system limits and bottlenecks, and defining success criteria to scale experimentation and speed up analysis.”

“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.”

Ravikanth Kasamsetty

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in AI, data platforms, and cloud SaaS

California, USA23y exp

“Senior engineering executive with a rare mix of VP-level people leadership and deep hands-on architecture across cloud-native and AI platforms. He led secure hybrid SaaS design at Promethium, built GenAI-powered analytics with LLMs/RAG, and translated customer needs into product wins including the largest deal in company history and a PLG motion that generated 100+ leads.”

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.”