Vetted Engineering Managers

“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.”

“Angel investor (Bluegrass Angels) who advises early-stage companies on product and organizational design, with a background leading corporate back-office (finance/customer service) and supply chain. Proposed and implemented a Global Business Services/shared services unit at a large corporation, building the savings/ROI case and running quarterly progress reviews to ensure adoption and results.”

“Former Cisco professional who successfully pitched and got funding for adding virtualization to access routers to enable third-party application development, framing the opportunity with clear revenue upside and risk management. Highly interested in AI—especially agent-based development—and believes it lowers the barrier to building and shipping new products with small, high-caliber teams.”

“Engineering leader at Bayer Crop Science leading a Core Platform team responsible for widely used open-source TypeScript/React and mobile SDKs (npm/GitHub) embedded across 10M+ monthly active devices. Known for shipping high-performance, backward-compatible developer frameworks with rigorous release discipline (bi-weekly releases, 99.99% uptime, long streaks of zero breaking changes) and major DX wins (onboarding cut to minutes, support tickets down 82%).”