Vetted Director of Engineerings

“Senior engineering executive who has spent the last decade leading large-scale platform modernization while staying deeply hands-on in architecture, debugging, and code reviews. He has led 120+ person organizations, built cloud-native SaaS and identity platforms across regulated and enterprise domains, and ties engineering decisions directly to revenue outcomes, including contributing to Wind River's $1B+ milestone.”

“Co-founded a Digital Loss Prevention (DLP) startup and raised $6M in seed funding by showcasing a controlled, laptop-based technology demo. Post-funding, drove MVP planning and execution by sequencing operations and assembling a team to build an appliance MVP, using an iterative build/evaluate/visualize approach.”

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.”

“Brazil-based startup CTO who raised $3M and spent 5 years building an agri-fintech credit origination tool for farmers, including going through Y Combinator and fundraising via Demo Day and Brazilian VCs. Ultimately shut the company down due to market shifts (rising interest rates and farmer delinquency), demonstrating pragmatic judgment and deep exposure to credit-market dynamics.”

“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.”