Vetted Engineering Managers in the Bay Area

“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.”

“Amazon engineering leader (15+ years) targeting Senior Manager/Director roles, with deep ownership of contact-center latency and reliability initiatives. Shipped a global production improvement cutting call latency 30–40% and led a complex Citrix SDK integration, including incident response and a backward-compatible rollout strategy to protect existing customers while enabling new features.”

“Automotive technology leader who has driven ADAS/autonomous driving (L2++ to L4) and AI-assistance roadmaps for Mercedes and Volkswagen Group. In current role, built a software-defined vehicle organization from a handful of people to ~150 supporting VW, Porsche, and Audi, while setting scalable architecture foundations across brands and vehicle classes.”

“Amazon engineer/leader who drove a major modernization of the AWS Database Migration Service Console, migrating a monolithic UI to a micro-frontend architecture while improving performance, reliability, and engineering standards. Operates as a player-coach (80/20 hands-on/management), with demonstrated incident ownership and process improvements across Amazon and Walmart Labs.”

“Engineering/data platform leader from FLYR (airline ML forecasting and automated pricing) who built scalable ingestion/ETL and a canonical data model to onboard airlines with highly heterogeneous source systems. Created a golden-metrics layer for airline KPIs and implemented monitoring/backfill capabilities, cutting onboarding time by 50%+ while improving SLA performance and controlling cloud/ML training costs through stronger data quality gates.”

“Engineering leader with hands-on Android architecture expertise who has scaled mobile teams at Weedmaps (including forming a Platform team and rolling out MVVM/unit testing) and also co-founded a bootstrapped side business (Sizzle), owning the technical roadmap, hiring strategy (university pipeline + senior remote engineers in Pakistan), and stepping into fundraising when runway became critical.”

“Early-stage founder in the ideation phase who previously took a hackathon concept in digital accessibility from prototype to a scalable SaaS platform, validating with developers, government web teams, and accessibility experts; the product was selected for deployment by the Indian Government. Strong focus on MVP validation, leveraging AI/automation, and building with limited resources; requires visa sponsorship due to immigration status.”

“Hands-on engineering manager at a marketing company leading a highly senior, distributed team (10 direct reports) while personally coding ~60–70% and owning end-to-end architecture across three interconnected products. Built agentic CRM automation and a reinforcement-learning-driven distribution layer for channel spend/bidding, with a strong focus on scalable design and observability (Prometheus/APM/logging) enabling frequent releases and few production incidents.”

“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.”

“Player-coach engineering leader focused on AWS ML infrastructure and deep learning image delivery: provisioned EKS/Kubernetes for multi-node training and automated image release pipelines (Python + AWS CDK) to cut release time from 2 weeks to 1. Also built customer migration tooling for SageMaker HyperPod and owned a security incident end-to-end, implementing prevention tests and process improvements.”

“Senior engineering leader with experience at Cisco, Amazon, and startup Shopkick, operating at high scale (e.g., Secure Web Gateway handling ~40M QPS). Known for measurable impact across reliability and cost (85% efficacy improvement; Datadog spend cut from ~$500k/month to ~$15k/month) and for leading complex platform modernization (1-year monolith-to-microservices/event-driven migration with zero customer impact) plus compatibility-focused API design that cut device onboarding from a month to a day.”

“Engineering leader in cloud security at SysTech with player-coach experience spanning cross-team data/ownership standardization and reporting platform user-journey improvements. Stays technically deep through observability (SLA/SLOs, dashboards, alerting), rigorous code reviews (including AI-assisted coding), and end-to-end incident ownership in IAM/agentless cloud event collection. Targeting $270K–$300K base plus bonus/equity.”