Vetted Head of Engineerings in California

“Engineering leader with hands-on architecture depth who has managed offshore teams up to ~30 engineers across mobile, web, backend, and Roku. Particularly strong in applying AI pragmatically—driving code-generation and review workflows, tailoring model usage by tech stack, and building internal LLM/RAG tools—while also improving operational KPIs through automation, cost optimization, and workflow redesign in content/media environments.”

“Senior engineering leader in healthcare AI who combines org scaling with deep hands-on architecture work. At DriveHealth.ai, they helped evolve isolated workflows into a production-grade intelligent platform, standardizing a shared RAG+DCE architecture while leading teams of 50+ across engineering, AI, platform, QA, and DevOps.”

Cornelius O'Donnell

Screened

Director-level Engineering & Program Leader specializing in AI product platforms

San Diego, CA25y exp

“Technical Program Manager and one of three internal "founders" of HP’s Hardware-as-a-Service home printer subscription initiative, spanning DTC shipping, simplified setup, ink replenishment, and warranty coverage. Led roadmap definition/execution, scaled delivery rapidly to 15+ scrum teams (including vendors) with SAFe-like coordination and shared engineering standards, and drove key architecture trade-offs (building an interim subscription management service) to accelerate time-to-market by about a year.”

Amit Sharma

Screened

Principal Software Engineer specializing in AI/LLM platforms, payments, and healthcare systems

San Francisco, CA25y exp

“Engineering player-coach who recently shipped an agent-based workflow to extract key info from unstructured web data (browser agents + CDP) and populate daily digests/calendars, owning architecture through testing. Also built a Flask-based LLM evaluation and regression testing system using G-Eval/Confident AI dashboards, and applies a rigorous, research-driven approach to selecting third-party tools with stakeholder buy-in; has healthcare ops/onboarding workflow experience at Vivio Health.”

“Player-coach engineering leader currently running a Solution Architecture/FDE team responsible for both presales and postsales delivery. Stands out for combining enterprise systems thinking with hands-on AI product work: they built configurable tooling that sped delivery by ~30%, drove a Kafka-to-Pulsar architecture shift for scale, and spent the last two years building LLM-based document extraction and RAG inference pipelines shaped directly by user feedback.”

Melissa Bennett

Screened

Executive engineering and AI leader specializing in healthcare AI and startup scaling

Los Angeles, CA21y exp

“Engineering leader who has built teams and products from scratch in both healthcare AI and consumer tech. Most notably, they grew Thrive AI Health’s engineering org from 0 to 20 and led delivery of a multimodal, multi-agent AI health coach—including a real-time voice experience piloted with Eli Lilly—while previously scaling Sweetgreen’s mobile ordering platform into a major revenue channel.”

Trevor Peace

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Senior Full-Stack Engineer specializing in Healthcare IT

San Francisco, CA27y exp

“Founding/sole engineer who has built multiple healthcare products from scratch, spanning medical billing, cardiology triage, and cardiac device monitoring. Particularly compelling for healthtech and AI roles: they combine full-stack TypeScript/AWS execution with strong product judgment in regulated settings, including shipping voice-enabled RAG workflows and rejecting unsafe AI automation when simpler human-in-the-loop UX was the right answer.”

Bibhash Biswas

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive technology leader specializing in AI/ML, SaaS, and cloud architecture

Los Angeles, CA25y exp

“Hands-on CTO and player-coach engineering leader from MindShow who led a 10-person team, transformed a services business into a licensable product sold to Fortune 500 customers, and stayed deep in architecture, AI, and UI work. Particularly notable for combining microservices/system design leadership with practical AI product delivery in speech and media workflows, including a phoneme-generation system the candidate says achieved 99.9%+ accuracy.”

“Currently serving as VP of Technology since January 2025, this candidate was brought in to build a fintech lending platform from the ground up, including hiring a global team and delivering a unified AI-enabled platform. They combine executive-level ownership with hands-on architecture work, including a customer-facing document agent and Plaid integration, and emphasize pragmatic AI adoption tied to measurable engineering productivity.”

“Engineering leader who grew from Lead Developer to CTO at Clips4Sale, scaling the org to around 30 people while restructuring engineering around revenue-driving initiatives like search, payments, reliability, and creator tools. Also built AI-powered event discovery and chatbot systems at FOSH using Claude, combining human feedback, prompt evaluation, and product simplification to improve output quality and user experience.”