Vetted Engineering Managers in the Bay Area

“Former Walmart Director of Software Engineering who left in March 2025 to build products for clients. Recently delivered an LLM/RAG-based UNSPSC classification solution for an MRO client using a multi-stage retrieval + web search + prompt-engineering workflow, and has led large-scale retail forecasting initiatives and high-severity cloud-migration incidents end-to-end.”

“Engineering Manager/Tech Lead on Grindr’s monetization team who helped ship an AI-powered conversation summary feature (A-list), contributing across Android freemium implementation and backend LLM workflow service architecture/reviews. Demonstrated strong operational ownership by leading a Boost production incident from detection through rollback and prevention, and improved team throughput by introducing a lightweight end-to-end delivery process in a high-growth environment.”

“Platform and distributed-systems leader (player-coach) who owned architecture and reliability for an Amazon analytics/data platform serving ~100K internal users at exabyte scale. Built an ML-driven “Lakeflow” optimization layer that cut pipeline completion times ~20–25% and reduced compute waste >15%, and led major incident response/redesign efforts (e.g., deletion storm) with strong rollout/observability/rollback practices.”

“Senior engineering leader in the Bay Area with experience spanning VMware, Hortonworks/Cloudera, Barracuda, and Palo Alto Networks, including leading open-source work (Apache Knox) and architecting large-scale security platforms. Has driven disaster recovery and cloud security products, designed Python microservices for Microsoft 365 security, and scaled teams (3x) while formalizing enterprise readiness practices with automated documentation using Notebook LLM.”

“Architect/engineering leader who built a multi-tenant AI platform end-to-end, including a secure FastAPI orchestrator (JWT, RBAC, tenant isolation, auditing) and an extensible MCP tool-routing layer, then productionized it via fully containerized microservices (Docker, Postgres/pgvector, Redis). Also has strong governance and compliance experience (ARB with security/privacy/SOX) and has owned high-severity incidents through mitigation and RCA/RCCA, plus prior high-volume payments/accounting data pipeline design with audit-grade integrity checks.”

“Engineering leader who drove TiVo IPTV’s client-facing API modernization from a monolith to AWS-based microservices (API Gateway, Lambda, EKS, Kafka, DynamoDB/RDS), including phased/blue-green production routing of millions of calls. Emphasizes org scaling through skill-based hiring, mentorship, and a you-build-you-run ownership culture, while balancing technical leadership with executive stakeholder communication and budgeting.”

“Game engineering leader/player-coach who recently shipped Netflix/Boss Fight’s mobile hit Squid Games Unleashed, owning live ops scheduling (XML/JSON to C# in Unity) and storefront integrations while reviewing 6–8 engineers’ code. Experienced in client-server reliability work (The Sims 4 time-sync incident) and in speeding delivery via process redesign (gated approvals), with a coaching style informed by 6 years teaching improv theater.”

“Engineering leader (Credit Karma/fintech) who built internal developer-platform frameworks at near open-source scale, including a unified key management system migrating ~450 services from on-prem HSM to a centralized KMS. Known for driving large cross-team migrations with strong safety mechanisms (canaries, shadow reads, rollback toggles) and measurable DX/ops improvements (60% fewer provisioning requests; 40% faster time-to-first-secret).”

“Engineering manager leading a 15-person team at FBN on the Gridbull platform, shipping a self-serve pricing/quoting tool for structured commodity products using real-time futures market data. Owns architecture and reliability for third-party data integrations (WebSocket + REST fallback), including resolving a day-one production incident caused by undocumented vendor connection resets. Introduced lightweight Technical Implementation Plans to improve cross-functional alignment and delivery speed in a high-growth environment.”