Vetted Engineering Managers in the Bay Area

“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.”

Rob Wlaschin

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Director-level Engineering Manager specializing in AI platforms, FinTech, and Healthtech

Santa Clara, CA24y exp

“Serial entrepreneur building three distinct products: a context-aware AI chatbot, a connected TV companion-screen platform with an implementation client, and gamerogue.net, a mobile-optimized web-based virtual tabletop marketplace currently seeking funding. Brings hands-on fundraising experience, familiarity with the VC/accelerator ecosystem including YC, and a notably pragmatic approach to validating ideas based on existing market demand rather than speculative adoption.”

“Operations/project leader with hands-on experience driving an end-to-end transition of legacy customers from on-prem to cloud, including customer communication, structured execution planning, and operational handover. Also improved field operations productivity by selecting and implementing a field management tool that automated work orders and replaced spreadsheet/email workflows with mobile app-driven data flows.”

“Backend-focused JavaScript/Node.js engineer with e-commerce domain depth from Decathlon, working on foundational microservices for order management, inventory, and fulfillment integrations. Led an infrastructure redesign and shipped a Shopify-based persistent cart experience, diagnosing early production issues via monitoring/log analysis and improving reliability through stronger session persistence and fault-tolerant architecture.”

Rajesh Sivakumar

Screened

Senior Software Engineering Manager specializing in cloud-native distributed systems (FinTech & Healthcare)

San Francisco, CA26y exp

“Engineering leader/player-coach who has led 40+ developers across multiple teams on large financial services web applications (Wells Fargo) and previously delivered a banking mobile app MVP in 6 months with a junior team by setting patterns and CI/CD foundations. Strong in production reliability practices (Splunk monitoring, feature flags, throttled rollouts) and has driven measurable quality/velocity wins, including a 60% faster E2E test framework and a rapid 2-day hotfix during a React 16→18 migration.”

Ashutosh Srivastava

Screened

Senior Engineering Manager specializing in AI platforms and cloud-native backend systems

Sunnyvale, CA11y exp

“Player-coach engineering leader who stayed hands-on (coding/reviews) while leading delivery, including designing an event-driven AI workflow engine with explicit state modeling and robust retries. Built near real-time enterprise analytics for campaign measurement and drove reliability/process improvements (observability, incident runbooks, release management). Introduced lightweight CI/CD and automated testing to cut release time by ~40% while maintaining quality.”