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.”

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.”

“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.”

Diego Leyton

Screened

Senior Software Engineer specializing in AR/VR, metaverse, and game development

Menlo Park, CA14y exp

“Unity/C# gameplay engineer from Horizon Worlds with deep experience shipping multiplayer VR and mobile features, especially scalable real-time animation and object interaction systems. Stands out for redesigning a high-overhead RPC-based animation pipeline into a deterministic client-side playback architecture that reduced network load, improved stability in complex worlds, and enabled previously unpublishable worlds to ship.”

“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.”

Alexander Schaab

Screened

Executive Technology & Product Leader specializing in ADAS and software-defined vehicles

Cupertino, CA14y exp

“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.”

Sanket Patel

Screened

Director-level Front-End Engineering Leader specializing in scalable web and mobile apps

Palo Alto, CA17y exp

“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.”