Vetted Engineering Managers in California

“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.”

Ananda Kanagaraj Sankar

Screened

Engineering Leader specializing in marketplace monetization, pricing, payments, and trust & safety

San Jose, CA14y exp

“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.”

Rohini Rajagopalan

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in SaaS, Cloud Migration, and Cybersecurity

Santa clara, CA8y exp

“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.”

Shady Ashkar

Screened

Executive Technology & Engineering Leader specializing in SaaS, FinTech and HealthTech

Orange County, CA30y exp

“Engineering leader (Octane) who drove business-aligned technology roadmaps and scaled a fully distributed engineering org from 35 to 150 in 9 months using a rigorous ownership model (OARP). Led a greenfield architecture for a new vertical (AWS Lambda/ECS, Python/JS/React) that delivered an MVP in 3 months while cutting per-service cloud OPEX from ~$300+ to ~$20/month, with 15+ years of remote-first leadership experience.”

“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.”

Sourabh Jain

Screened

Director of Software Engineering specializing in enterprise Data, ML & AI platforms

Bay Area, CA23y exp

“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.”

Jehanzeb Khan

Screened

Director-level Engineering Manager specializing in large-scale data and compute platforms

Sunnyvale, CA20y exp

“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.”

“Senior Engineering Manager with a player-coach style who stays technically engaged through heavy code reviews and pair programming. Led prioritization and stakeholder alignment for a scalable, resilient feature-flag evaluation service with strict sub-50ms latency goals, including a major caching-strategy redesign and incremental rollout approach. Experienced in incident response/retrospectives and in coaching engineers toward improved performance and promotions.”