Vetted Director of Engineerings in California

“Engineering leader and player-coach with a long tenure leading 5 teams/17 engineers, combining organizational leadership with hands-on SQL, architecture, and production incident work. Particularly notable for shipping AI-powered lead engagement systems like an intelligent voice agent, while also driving operational improvements such as release cadence standardization, team restructures, database migrations, and major rules-engine performance gains.”

“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.”

“Engineering leader with hands-on architecture depth who has managed offshore teams up to ~30 engineers across mobile, web, backend, and Roku. Particularly strong in applying AI pragmatically—driving code-generation and review workflows, tailoring model usage by tech stack, and building internal LLM/RAG tools—while also improving operational KPIs through automation, cost optimization, and workflow redesign in content/media environments.”

Josh Rhoades

Screened

Executive Technology Leader (CTO) specializing in AI-enabled SaaS and regulated platforms

Los Angeles, CA30y exp

“Senior engineering leader with experience at Disney and BlackLine who drives business-aligned technology roadmaps through deep Product/Engineering partnership (two-in-a-box) and pragmatic prioritization frameworks. Has led major modernization initiatives—private-to-public cloud migration to GCP with multi-cloud evolution, data-layer performance improvements (Mongo/Redis, caching/query optimization), and tooling upgrades (VSS to GitHub)—while scaling teams with strong quality and accountability culture.”

“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.”