Vetted Engineering Managers in the Los Angeles Metro

“Senior engineering leader at AWS currently managing two services in the MSK organization, including Replicator for disaster recovery/data distribution and Glue Schema Registry. He combines hands-on distributed systems depth with large-scale people leadership, having managed teams up to 32 engineers and coordinated platform onboarding work across roughly 340 AWS services. Earlier experience in payroll and compliance platforms adds strong enterprise domain breadth beyond cloud infrastructure.”

“Engineering leader and player-coach with a long tenure leading 5 teams/17 engineers, combining organizational leadership with hands-on SQL, architecture, and production incident work. Particularly notable for shipping AI-powered lead engagement systems like an intelligent voice agent, while also driving operational improvements such as release cadence standardization, team restructures, database migrations, and major rules-engine performance gains.”

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 leader with hands-on architecture depth who has managed offshore teams up to ~30 engineers across mobile, web, backend, and Roku. Particularly strong in applying AI pragmatically—driving code-generation and review workflows, tailoring model usage by tech stack, and building internal LLM/RAG tools—while also improving operational KPIs through automation, cost optimization, and workflow redesign in content/media environments.”

“Engineering leader who has operated effectively in both a VC-backed startup and SAP, combining director-level org leadership with day-to-day technical depth. Notable for re-architecting integrations that produced a 3x revenue gain, leading a 90-engineer matrixed organization, and staying hands-on in GenAI, infrastructure, and full-stack problem solving.”

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 director and former front-end engineering manager with a strong blend of people leadership, UX/design-system ownership, and hands-on technical depth. At Siemens, they led a 15-person US/Europe team through a SaaS-era design-system transformation, winning over resistant product teams and exceeding adoption goals; at Intellimize, they solved legacy-browser constraints with a custom TypeScript-based build pipeline that improved quality, morale, and user experience.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”