Vetted Director of Engineerings in the Los Angeles Metro

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.”

“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.”