Vetted Engineering Managers

“Engineering leader/player-coach who built and validated a preference-based recommendation engine using clustering, including generating test data to evaluate how clusters evolve over time. Has SRE/DevOps experience and has owned production incidents end-to-end (logging-driven RCA and refactoring patterns that failed at large data scale). Emphasizes quality and platform stability via unit, integration, and load testing, and has managed performance via regular 1:1s and PIPs.”

“Engineering leader who drove Lightroom Mobile’s roadmap at Adobe by enforcing reuse of Photoshop imaging tech to deliver RAW, non-destructive mobile editing with full Creative Cloud compatibility. In startup environments, has repeatedly scaled and professionalized engineering orgs (career ladders, evaluation systems, delivery process) and led high-stakes cloud/platform transformations—migrating off Heroku and consolidating fragmented AWS/GCP usage into a single GCP platform—improving reliability, deploy speed, and cutting cloud costs by 20%+.”

“Hands-on engineering leader with early-stage startup experience who balances coding with executive alignment and delegation. Has delivered offline-capable SaaS mobile demos under tight timelines, built monetization-ready mobile architectures (dynamic cloud assets + in-app purchases), and increased product velocity via component-based game architecture plus stakeholder self-serve tooling.”

“Senior Microsoft engineering leader who has led globally distributed orgs of up to 250 engineers while staying deeply technical in large-scale platform architecture, reliability, and AI systems. Notable work includes modernizing Teams infrastructure serving massive global scale and incubating an internal AI pair-programmer/knowledge-graph platform over 650M lines of code, plus helping launch foundational Copilot search and retrieval APIs.”

“Candidate brings experience across both startups and big tech, along with direct exposure to pitching ideas to several VCs. They show a practical founder mindset centered on rapid prototyping, customer feedback, retention, and building AI/agent-driven products with strong product-market fit potential.”

Sahitya Thota

Screened

Staff/Tech Lead Software Engineer specializing in identity, data platforms, and cloud systems

Fremont, CA20y exp

“Engineering leader/player-coach who built and owned end-to-end sales-facing data products, including a 360° advertiser insights platform and a sales AI agent for natural-language access to insights. Demonstrated strong architecture and reliability chops (event-driven redesign to eliminate Hive-query throttling; batching/caching to reduce fan-out) plus incident ownership around ads attribution consistency. Also has 0→1 experience building graph-based recommendation/matching systems with explainability and tight user feedback loops.”

“Repeat startup co-founder with multiple successful exits and significant fundraising experience (most recent raise $6M USD; prior raise £10M GBP). Interested in roles bridging investors and startups—performing due diligence and evaluating MVPs/USPs to help firms invest in the right companies and support portfolio growth toward exit.”

“Founder building an enterprise agentic AI startup who has already raised about $100K (friends & family plus self-funding). Has prior and current experience engaging VCs (including outreach to both large and small firms) and emphasizes demo-driven pitching, enterprise customer validation, and targeting billion-dollar market opportunities.”