Vetted Head of Engineerings

Christopher McLean

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in security, privacy, and high-scale infrastructure

Brookline, MA18y exp

“Veteran operator from top-tier tech companies including PayPal, LinkedIn, Stripe, Facebook, and Merge, now seeking the right startup idea to found. Brings hands-on angel investing experience across 5 startups in the EU and US plus additional exposure through X-Stripe Angels, giving them both operator and investor perspective.”

“Engineering leader who drove Lightroom Mobile’s roadmap at Adobe by enforcing reuse of Photoshop imaging tech to deliver RAW, non-destructive mobile editing with full Creative Cloud compatibility. In startup environments, has repeatedly scaled and professionalized engineering orgs (career ladders, evaluation systems, delivery process) and led high-stakes cloud/platform transformations—migrating off Heroku and consolidating fragmented AWS/GCP usage into a single GCP platform—improving reliability, deploy speed, and cutting cloud costs by 20%+.”

“Senior engineering/technology leader with experience driving board-backed, multi-year platform transformations in retail commerce (American Eagle) and scaling ML/product delivery platforms at Amazon Alexa. Known for data-driven build-vs-buy decisions, org scaling (6→80), and measurable outcomes including 98.5%→99.9% uptime, 234 experiments generating ~$200M revenue lift, and increasing delivery velocity from 1.5 to 30 features/week while transitioning to DNN/large-model architectures.”

“Candidate brings experience across both startups and big tech, along with direct exposure to pitching ideas to several VCs. They show a practical founder mindset centered on rapid prototyping, customer feedback, retention, and building AI/agent-driven products with strong product-market fit potential.”

“Fintech product builder focused on AI-native opportunities; recently helped their company operationalize LLMs in customer service and bank ops by creating systems to continuously improve prompts and evaluations. Also drove growth by identifying hooks in a major American retailer distribution channel and integrating into the retailer’s payment flows to become a key part of the user funnel.”

Zheng Liu

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in AI platforms and FinTech

Seattle, WA13y exp

“Engineering and product leader who currently owns both functions at Enzzo and previously served as a founding/head of engineering leader at Imprint, helping scale the company from seed to Series C. Stands out for combining customer-driven product strategy with hands-on technical execution, including an early AI/open-source LLM solution to reduce the time and cost of persona-based user research.”

RAMAKRISHNA JULURI

Screened

Executive Technology Leader (SVP/VP/CTO) specializing in cloud-native platforms and AI modernization

Seattle, WA28y exp

“Engineering leader with experience across MSCI (Index business), Microsoft Teams (callings/meetings), and MSN Weather. Has led business-aligned roadmaps, scaled orgs (including an ~80-person Teams org during COVID demand surge), and delivered Azure-based, multi-region architectures achieving ~2000 RPS and 99.9% availability with improved RTO/RPO.”

“Operations/engineering leader from Poly who optimized a professional headset portfolio by aggressively prioritizing technical debt and consolidating HW/SW platforms (down to 2 each), accelerating time-to-market by ~6 months and enabling 3–6 month variant cycles. Also drove AI-enabled quality improvements by leveraging JIRA bug data to automate test case creation and expand coverage, while aligning engineering and product management around MVO delivery.”

“Senior software engineering leader with 20+ years of management exposure who has alternated between IC and director-level roles, leading teams of up to 25 across AI platform, analytics, Salesforce, and systems software projects. Particularly compelling for roles needing both technical depth and organizational leadership: they have architected systems themselves, built teams in new geographies, and coordinated platform, AI/data, and consumer engineering groups to deliver successful turnkey AI solutions.”

william chen

Screened

Executive game technology leader specializing in product innovation and live-service platforms

Los Angeles, CA27y exp

“Serial entrepreneur with multiple successful exits who has previously raised several rounds and worked with accelerators. Currently building an AI-powered life simulation universe with prompt-based creation and a self-evolving persistent world, backed by completed market research and an MVP in development.”

“Senior engineering executive-level leader with deep hands-on systems expertise across Amazon devices, Alexa, Echo, and FireTV/VegaOS. Unusually combines VP-level org leadership at 120+ scale with direct production debugging and architecture ownership, including hybrid edge-AI/cloud systems, partner platforms for 9000+ apps, and shipping long-horizon platform bets under aggressive release cadences.”

“Senior engineering leader with a rare blend of deep platform/infrastructure expertise and large-scale people leadership, spanning hands-on cloud-native architecture through management of globally distributed organizations of up to roughly 180 engineers. Particularly strong in Kubernetes platform modernization, reliability engineering, and scaling high-throughput SaaS systems while aligning platform investments to customer and business outcomes.”