Vetted Head of Engineerings in the Los Angeles Metro

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.”