Vetted Engineering Managers in California

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.”

bikramjit ganguly

Screened

Staff Full-Stack Engineer specializing in API-driven web platforms and distributed systems

San Jose, CA24y exp

“Highly agent-centric builder who uses Codex daily to generate and manage full application repos, including Next.js CRUD apps, GitHub automation, and AWS lifecycle scripts to avoid long-lived cloud artifacts. They also experiment with multi-agent workflows for parallel development and correctness checking, showing strong practical fluency with emerging AI-native software development patterns.”

“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.”

“Currently serving as VP of Technology since January 2025, this candidate was brought in to build a fintech lending platform from the ground up, including hiring a global team and delivering a unified AI-enabled platform. They combine executive-level ownership with hands-on architecture work, including a customer-facing document agent and Plaid integration, and emphasize pragmatic AI adoption tied to measurable engineering productivity.”

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.”

“Engineering leader who grew from Lead Developer to CTO at Clips4Sale, scaling the org to around 30 people while restructuring engineering around revenue-driving initiatives like search, payments, reliability, and creator tools. Also built AI-powered event discovery and chatbot systems at FOSH using Claude, combining human feedback, prompt evaluation, and product simplification to improve output quality and user experience.”

“Engineering leader for a facial-recognition edge platform who drove a full-stack modernization to scale from ~100 edge devices to thousands of locations. Led a major distributed-systems re-architecture (NATS streaming), database migration (MongoDB to PostgreSQL + TimeScaleDB), and UI/API modernization (React), while scaling the team 5→15 and implementing CI/CD + automated QA to improve release velocity and reliability.”

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.”

“Engineering leader with hands-on architecture depth who has improved team delivery cadence to weekly releases by redesigning SDLC ownership and validation workflows. Currently leading AI/LLM product work around meeting-transcript intelligence for sales use cases, with a strong emphasis on observability, prompt tuning, and iterative UX refinement.”