Vetted Engineering Managers in California

“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.”

Jignesh Desai

Screened

Director of Software Engineering specializing in fraud detection and payments platforms

San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA26y exp

“Engineering manager/player-coach who focuses on laying technical foundations and improving team execution: kickstarted Visa standard UI library adoption, standardized API exception handling, and introduced a test automation framework that enabled a shift from quarterly to monthly releases. Led a phased latency/throughput initiative that doubled throughput, and owned a production incident caused by a dependency’s expired certificate, driving monitoring and certificate-expiry notification improvements across dependent systems.”

“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.”

Jones Pavan

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in platform modernization and AI integration

Burbank, CA15y exp

“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.”

“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).”

Chanatip Vachirathanusorn

Screened

Entry-level Software Engineer specializing in full-stack and FinTech systems

San Diego, CA2y exp

“Software engineer with AppFolio payments experience who shipped an end-to-end payment adoption rollout during a short internship, including full-stack implementation, stakeholder coordination, and real-time monitoring. Also built an insurance service AI agent inspired by his father's agency, combining structured document ingestion, RAG, and agentic integrations to improve reliability on dense policy documents.”

“Engineering leader/CTO-type with deep experience building and scaling a vehicle routing platform at Transdev On Demand, including a nationwide rollout to 22 US airports ahead of schedule. Drove engineering best practices (CI/CD, high test coverage, pair programming, automated deployments) and led a multi-tenant architectural upgrade to expand the routing engine to additional business lines and external customers.”

“Hands-on engineering leader who has scaled teams quickly (hired 20 engineers in 4 months) and led major architecture shifts including monolith-to-microservices and serverless, async AI-driven medical data ingestion/search. Also drove a versioned-inventory redesign with auditability and rollback that reduced operational errors by 22%, and demonstrates strong incident response with clear stakeholder communication.”

“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.”