Vetted Founding Engineers in the Bay Area

Arjun Kulkarni

Screened

Junior Software Engineer specializing in AI, LLM systems, and healthcare applications

San Francisco, CA3y exp

“Product-minded full-stack engineer with experience improving performance, UX, and platform architecture across startups including SideShift, Curator, Congruence, and work on an AI coding assistant called Exec. Stands out for cutting messaging-system Redis traffic by roughly 95%, redesigning user flows for faster adoption, and building reusable multi-tenant systems and cross-platform APIs without over-abstracting.”

“Built a production Python microservice around Grafana Loki focused on reliability, with checkpointing, idempotency, replay tooling, tracing, and alerting to prevent data loss and silent lag. Also has hands-on experience hardening brittle Playwright automations against dynamic UIs, auth expiry, rate limits, MFA, and bot-detection constraints, plus turning tribal-knowledge SOPs into explicit state-machine-driven workflows.”

“Engineering Manager/player-coach leading Data Infrastructure, ML/DS, and AI Engineering pods who recently shipped multiple production agentic GenAI features. Built privacy-preserving LLM workflows (PII redaction via Microsoft Presidio) and drove an AI expense-approval agent from ambiguous ask to GA, cutting approval time from ~2.5 days to <4 hours with >85% accuracy. Also owned a major LLM cost overrun incident and implemented cost observability plus circuit breakers to prevent runaway agent loops.”

“ML practitioner with hands-on experience in healthcare time-series modeling (CGM-based blood glucose prediction) including a novel ICA-based blind source separation approach and robust data-cleaning for noisy, missing sensor data. Also built an embeddings + LLM-powered podcast recommendation workflow using YouTube transcript scraping and Vellum AI document indexing, with a strong emphasis on production-grade engineering practices (TDD, monitoring) and realistic rolling validation for forecasting.”

“Built and shipped a production LLM-powered grading platform that automates rubric-aligned scoring and feedback, with strong guardrails (RAG grounding, structured JSON, validation/retries) and operational rigor (metrics, drift monitoring). Experienced using CrewAI to orchestrate multi-agent workflows end-to-end and validating quality via gold-set benchmarking against human graders with regression testing on every prompt/model change.”

Yogita Adari

Screened

Mid-level AI Engineer specializing in generative and multimodal systems

San Francisco, CA4y exp

“Built and productionized an agentic LLM automation system for an insurance client to determine medication eligibility, using prompt-chaining plus a RAG pipeline over policy rules and deploying on AWS (Lambda/Step Functions, Bedrock) with a serverless architecture. Addressed major data/schema mismatch issues via a semantic matching pipeline and validated performance through human agreement scoring, A/B testing, KPI monitoring, and confidence-based human-in-the-loop review.”

Tarang Nair

Screened

Mid-Level Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in cloud-native APIs and AI apps

Oakland, CA5y exp

“Early-stage startup full-stack engineer who built an inventory and billing management product for retail shop owners in India, iterating quickly based on customer feedback. Has hands-on experience designing scalable cloud infrastructure on GCP with Kubernetes and applying clean architecture for testable, modular systems; also built internal monitoring dashboards for error and performance visibility.”