Vetted Engineering Managers

“Technologist drawn to venture studio/zero-to-one environments, motivated by owning technical architecture and building scalable systems from day one. Interested in rapidly shipping MVPs, iterating toward product-market fit, and validating ideas through real user feedback rather than pursuing entrepreneurship for its own sake.”

“Explored a digital notarization startup concept in 2020 that stalled due to COVID-era inability to secure VC seed meetings; later saw the market validate the idea via a comparable acquisition (~$57M, per candidate). Now more interested in driving innovation and simplifying complex customer experiences within an established organization, using a highly structured, metrics-driven product execution approach.”

Alexander Schaab

Screened

Executive Technology & Product Leader specializing in ADAS and software-defined vehicles

Cupertino, CA14y exp

“Automotive technology leader who has driven ADAS/autonomous driving (L2++ to L4) and AI-assistance roadmaps for Mercedes and Volkswagen Group. In current role, built a software-defined vehicle organization from a handful of people to ~150 supporting VW, Porsche, and Audi, while setting scalable architecture foundations across brands and vehicle classes.”

Kusumita Dasgupta

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in data platforms, cloud systems, and LLM products

United States22y exp

“Engineering leader/player-coach with recent hands-on work delivering an agentic AI MVP on Amazon Bedrock (conversational UI + supervisor agent routing between internal knowledge and external sources). Previously drove large-scale data platform cost optimization at Twitter, saving ~$3M–$5M annually, and has owned production incidents end-to-end with a focus on analytics/monitoring improvements and team coaching.”

Sanket Patel

Screened

Director-level Front-End Engineering Leader specializing in scalable web and mobile apps

Palo Alto, CA17y exp

“Amazon engineer/leader who drove a major modernization of the AWS Database Migration Service Console, migrating a monolithic UI to a micro-frontend architecture while improving performance, reliability, and engineering standards. Operates as a player-coach (80/20 hands-on/management), with demonstrated incident ownership and process improvements across Amazon and Walmart Labs.”

Kaushik Mukherjee

Screened

Executive technology leader specializing in search, ads, and data/AI platforms

Bangalore, India

“Engineering/technology leader with payments (UPI) scale experience who built fraud and growth systems for tens of millions of daily transactions while keeping CAC and cost guardrails. Scaled an engineering org from 12 to 155 in a year using platform + pod structures, and institutionalized canary deployments with auto-rollback (cutting degradations ~75%) while leveraging GenAI for code and test automation.”

“Former tech professional and repeat founder who previously built Promote.co, pitched a marketplace-focused ad platform to Expa Ventures, and raised capital to build the product. Has spent the last two years independently developing and using stock market strategies, and is now looking to return to tech to solve meaningful, difficult problems.”

“Engineering/data platform leader from FLYR (airline ML forecasting and automated pricing) who built scalable ingestion/ETL and a canonical data model to onboard airlines with highly heterogeneous source systems. Created a golden-metrics layer for airline KPIs and implemented monitoring/backfill capabilities, cutting onboarding time by 50%+ while improving SLA performance and controlling cloud/ML training costs through stronger data quality gates.”

“Hands-on engineering manager on a large web product who built an AI-driven navigation search and led a major post-acquisition unification effort across 3 companies and 5–7 teams, including front-end architecture for 60+ developers. Also owns a high-scale BFF (800 endpoints) and drove a deep reliability fix involving Kubernetes/Envoy/Redis session bloat, adding monitoring and preventative controls.”

“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.”

“Player-coach engineer/lead on a high-scale research integrity platform ("Lighthouse") that flags fraud/manipulation signals across ~3M academic manuscripts per year. Owns architecture decisions (ADRs), implements across Go/Java/React services, and introduced NLP (SciBERT embeddings + human-in-the-loop) to assess out-of-context citations while also handling production incidents with a data-consistency-first approach.”

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.”