Vetted Founders in the Bay Area

William Armstrong

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Junior Product Engineer specializing in AI and SaaS

San Francisco, CA1y exp

“Product intern at an AI startup (AdvisorGPT) who helped turn an LLM-based prototype into a production SEO blog-generation workflow that matched a firm’s tone/voice and targeted specific search phrases. Strong at bridging technical and non-technical teams, rapidly learning new AI tooling, and driving adoption through customer calls, UX improvements, and customer-facing demos/workshops.”

Alexander Churchill

Screened

Executive Talent Acquisition & Workforce Operations Leader specializing in global hiring

San Francisco / Denver, US23y exp

“Talent/Recruiting Operations leader who ran a 450–600 person multi-region org (USA/MX/Colombia) with end-to-end ownership of SLAs, capacity planning, funnel metrics, ATS/CRM, compliance, bench, and renewals. Known for high-impact operational redesigns—revamped sales comp to lift EBIT and built a CX function that improved renewals by 10% in 12 months (~$7M). Also drove a Slack-first AI workflow strategy that cut complex RFP turnaround from weeks to minutes.”

“Early-stage sales hire who joined a startup just 2-3 months after launch and built their own outbound motion in a low-process environment. They describe strong self-sourced selling, including persistent multi-channel outreach that led to a large account win, and later partnered with a teammate and CEO to create a playbook that lifted office performance by 60%+.”

“Product/UX designer with experience digitizing Penske trucking operations and Ridecell fleet lifecycle/workshop orchestration systems. Designs complex, high-liability industrial workflows using a state-driven interaction model and a calm, high-clarity visual language, backed by targeted field research with drivers and ops teams and strong collaboration with engineers (React/Tailwind, Storybook, code-linked prototypes).”

“Two-time founder and former CTO/CPO who has shipped and operated full-stack products solo, including a real-time community platform (Twitter/Slack-like) with Next.js/TypeScript, WebSockets, Redis, and strong post-launch analytics (PostHog/Sentry). Also built durable multi-step AI-agent workflows using Inngest with state machines, checkpointing, and validation gates, and has hands-on Postgres performance tuning experience validated via EXPLAIN ANALYZE.”

“Marketing designer with hands-on experience delivering high-impact physical brand experiences, including end-to-end trade show booth/space design for Payactiv across 5+ events (booth layouts, walls, print collateral, and swag) with heavy cross-functional and vendor coordination. Also builds scalable Figma systems for frequent landing-page production and produces lightweight marketing videos in CapCut using templates, AI background removal, and platform-specific exports.”

Berkan Özgür

Screened

Senior XR Engineer specializing in spatial computing and cross-platform Unity systems

San Jose, CA9y exp

“XR/Unity developer who built an underwater experience (Visutate) featuring reactive flocking fish that respond to user presence and hand-feeding interactions. Also implemented multiplayer using Unity Netcode, addressing sync challenges via reduced streamed data and client-side prediction; prefers impactful work in startup-style environments.”

“Cloud/distributed-systems engineer who has shipped real-time, offline-capable ledger/expense infrastructure and solved tricky cross-layer production bugs (carrier handoff retries causing duplicate writes) using packet captures and device logs. Also built modular Python ETL/catalog pipelines for e-commerce with config-toggled plugins for customer-specific pricing/SKU rules, and iterated product changes directly with on-site fulfillment operators using feature flags.”