Vetted Engineering Managers

“Hands-on engineering manager at a marketing company leading a highly senior, distributed team (10 direct reports) while personally coding ~60–70% and owning end-to-end architecture across three interconnected products. Built agentic CRM automation and a reinforcement-learning-driven distribution layer for channel spend/bidding, with a strong focus on scalable design and observability (Prometheus/APM/logging) enabling frequent releases and few production incidents.”

“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.”

“Director of Engineering at Proofpoint for 8 years, leading architecture and integration of Java microservices within a detection platform. Demonstrates pragmatic delivery leadership—incurring short-term cost to meet launch deadlines, then systematically paying down technical debt and optimizing AWS spend—plus a disciplined, long-horizon approach to backward-compatible API/schema evolution across many dependent services.”

“Player-coach engineering leader focused on AWS ML infrastructure and deep learning image delivery: provisioned EKS/Kubernetes for multi-node training and automated image release pipelines (Python + AWS CDK) to cut release time from 2 weeks to 1. Also built customer migration tooling for SageMaker HyperPod and owned a security incident end-to-end, implementing prevention tests and process improvements.”

“Engineering leader with experience building point-of-care diagnostics platforms (IoT-connected PCR device delivering results in <15 minutes) and scaling multidisciplinary teams (55+). Has led major data/IoT architecture decisions (multi-cluster Kubernetes with secure routing; Kafka + Gobblin over MQTT) and runs execution with Agile roadmaps tightly aligned to GTM and senior leadership.”

Rohini Rajagopalan

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in SaaS, Cloud Migration, and Cybersecurity

Santa clara, CA8y exp

“Senior engineering leader with experience at Cisco, Amazon, and startup Shopkick, operating at high scale (e.g., Secure Web Gateway handling ~40M QPS). Known for measurable impact across reliability and cost (85% efficacy improvement; Datadog spend cut from ~$500k/month to ~$15k/month) and for leading complex platform modernization (1-year monolith-to-microservices/event-driven migration with zero customer impact) plus compatibility-focused API design that cut device onboarding from a month to a day.”

“Engineering leader in cloud security at SysTech with player-coach experience spanning cross-team data/ownership standardization and reporting platform user-journey improvements. Stays technically deep through observability (SLA/SLOs, dashboards, alerting), rigorous code reviews (including AI-assisted coding), and end-to-end incident ownership in IAM/agentless cloud event collection. Targeting $270K–$300K base plus bonus/equity.”

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 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.”

Sourabh Jain

Screened

Director of Software Engineering specializing in enterprise Data, ML & AI platforms

Bay Area, CA23y exp

“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.”

Ashraf Jahangeer

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in AI, SaaS, and large-scale platform transformation

Pleasanton, CA19y exp

“Senior engineering executive with 20+ years of experience scaling and restructuring product engineering organizations across startups and larger companies. Over the last 8 years, they grew teams significantly at Stitch Fix and EasyPost, led monolith-to-microservices modernization, and launched products associated with 50M-100M+ ARR. Currently a hands-on VP Engineering at BlueCargo, combining executive leadership with direct technical contribution when customer-critical issues arise.”