Vetted Founders in the Bay Area

Prateek Patil

Screened

Engineering Leader specializing in Digital Health, AI, and Cloud Platforms

Santa Clara, CA16y exp

“Senior Engineering Manager at Roche leading two Scrum teams building internally shared (“inner-sourced”) tools and libraries for a healthcare enterprise. Has led security/compliance-first architecture decisions (e.g., Python AI modules running inside a Java container) and front-end modularization (Angular monorepo to module federation), with a strong focus on developer experience via automated Swagger/OpenAPI documentation and robust testing/versioning practices.”

jitender Hooda

Screened

Executive Client Partner specializing in engineering and digital services

San Ramon, CA19y exp

“Founder building an agentic AI-based low-code platform for B2B enterprise applications, validated through enterprise client conversations and delivered via rapid paid MVP/POCs. Platform has seen production traction (6–7 apps, 1000+ daily users) and includes capabilities like QR scanning integrated with ERP/PLM systems. Experienced in business development and client relationships, with a pragmatic, ROI- and speed-focused approach to product and GTM under tight capital constraints.”

Thomas To

Screened

Mid-level Full-Stack Engineer specializing in AI/ML data platforms for biotech and FinTech

Emeryville, CA6y exp

“AI/ML full-stack practitioner in a small-scale manufacturing/lab operations environment who deployed a production ML system to improve blood cell order fulfillment by predicting yield/success from donor characteristics. Experienced building custom multi-agent orchestration (Python, LangChain/LangGraph, MCP) and balancing reliability, data quality constraints, and token/ROI economics while communicating tradeoffs to VP-level business stakeholders.”

John Chen

Screened

Junior Full-Stack & Data Scientist specializing in ML/NLP and analytics products

Redwood City, CA2y exp

“Built and deployed profitprops.io, a sports betting player-props prediction product using ML/AI. Implemented backend APIs with FastAPI/Express.js and Supabase, trained models on AWS GPU (P3) using Docker + RAPIDS, and set up CI/CD with GitHub Actions while working around cost constraints and data-collection hurdles (EC2 proxy rotation/rate limits).”

“Startup builder (MagicSeven) who designed and implemented a browser-based, agentic video editor end-to-end, including an AWS event-driven multimodal LLM “indexing” pipeline and an orchestration LLM agent for searching and manipulating footage. Demonstrates deep video file/codec knowledge plus practical production hardening of LLM workflows (format validation, plan/execute, S3-based state for debuggability).”

Emmanuel Ngalima

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-Level Software Engineer specializing in geospatial AI and cloud security automation

San Ramon, CA5y exp

“Cloud engineer and cloud OS SME (Chevron) who productionized large-scale security remediation—using Tanium and Ansible to address CIS benchmark noncompliance across 5,000+ servers with robust logging and RCA handoffs. Also drives adoption of a geospatial AI refinery inspection product by consolidating siloed imagery into an enterprise geospatial database, and presents internally on agentic/LLM tooling (LangChain/LangGraph, LangSmith observability).”

“Enterprise/technical seller with ~2 decades of complex sales experience, focused on high-ACV AI/robotics-style deals. Self-sourced and closed a robotics opportunity into a $500K paid pilot that expanded to $1M, coordinating NDAs and multi-party integrations across NVIDIA GPU/CUDA, camera, and VMS stakeholders. Also founded a startup and built early pipeline from scratch, leading a small sales team to close initial deals in a pre-revenue MVP stage.”

Jax Diagana

Screened

Senior AI Engineer specializing in forward-deployed voice agents and incident-response automation

San Francisco, CA7y exp

“FDE at Bland.ai and founder of Fi (incident-response agent) who routinely takes LLM/agentic concepts from prototype to production. Has hands-on experience reverse-engineering undocumented systems to deliver integrations, building LLM testbeds for voice-agent reliability, and rapidly shipping RAG/semantic search solutions (e.g., Confluence runbooks) after deep customer discovery with DevOps/SRE teams.”

“Venture investing/sourcing professional who runs a high-volume, systematized founder outreach motion across warm intros, accelerators, social outbound, and databases (PitchBook/Crunchbase), targeting ~50 personalized founder touchpoints weekly. Uses AI workflows to build targeted lists and monitor company updates, and has converted highly contextual outbound into qualified diligence opportunities (e.g., industrial automation/frontline productivity). Values long-term founder relationships pre-raise through consistent value-add and is motivated by growth toward a partner track.”

“LLM/agent builder who has shipped production AI systems in the wellness space, including an LLM-powered food tracking product used by 5000+ users and a voice/call-routing onboarding workflow using LangGraph/LangChain with LiveKit and Twilio. Strong focus on practical reliability work: latency reduction, retrieval/embedding tuning, and CI-driven evaluation with simulations and metrics.”

Nehemiah Dias

Screened

Senior Frontend Engineer specializing in design systems and real-time SaaS platforms

San Francisco, CA11y exp

“Full-stack product builder who has repeatedly taken end-to-end ownership in startup environments, including building PromoFlow solo and architecting the entire software backbone for Hard Drive. Particularly strong at turning ambiguous product needs into scalable systems, from real-time Firebase apps to shared component libraries and redesigned Postgres architectures, while also bridging non-technical founders, design, and engineering.”