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.”

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.”

“Architecture leader from Disney who managed system, AI, and data architects while staying hands-on in solution design. Has experience building LLM-based video advertising products, designing Kafka-based real-time data architectures, and using MVP/POC approaches to align product and executive stakeholders.”

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.”

“Engineering leader who has operated effectively in both a VC-backed startup and SAP, combining director-level org leadership with day-to-day technical depth. Notable for re-architecting integrations that produced a 3x revenue gain, leading a 90-engineer matrixed organization, and staying hands-on in GenAI, infrastructure, and full-stack problem solving.”

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.”

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.”

“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.”

“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.”