Vetted Engineering Managers in California

“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 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.”

“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 from Blackline who has repeatedly rescued and delivered high-visibility products by resetting roadmaps, tightening execution (better specs/estimation), and accelerating team velocity. Scaled a distributed org from ~20 to ~40 engineers by building a new India team with strong hiring rubrics and governance-as-code/SDLC consistency. Also modernized legacy systems into microservices (Kafka/Kubernetes/Apigee) and drove hackathon-to-production innovation using Google Vertex AI.”