Vetted Director of Engineerings in California

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.”

Jones Pavan

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in platform modernization and AI integration

Burbank, CA15y exp

“Engineering leader from Blackline who has repeatedly rescued and delivered high-visibility products by resetting roadmaps, tightening execution (better specs/estimation), and accelerating team velocity. Scaled a distributed org from ~20 to ~40 engineers by building a new India team with strong hiring rubrics and governance-as-code/SDLC consistency. Also modernized legacy systems into microservices (Kafka/Kubernetes/Apigee) and drove hackathon-to-production innovation using Google Vertex AI.”

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.”

“Hands-on engineering leader who has scaled teams quickly (hired 20 engineers in 4 months) and led major architecture shifts including monolith-to-microservices and serverless, async AI-driven medical data ingestion/search. Also drove a versioned-inventory redesign with auditability and rollback that reduced operational errors by 22%, and demonstrates strong incident response with clear stakeholder communication.”

“Operations and manufacturing leader with experience acting as an internal CEO to build a new business inside IDEX Corp from a $15M budget, owning P&L and a 3-year plan through product launch. At Planet Innovation, used Lean/DMAIC-style value stream mapping to 4x production throughput (400 to ~1600 units/month), exceeding a customer’s 1200/month scaling target. Strong in building teams and operational systems (product development, quality, supply chain) and coaching non-ops founders using structured frameworks.”

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.”