Vetted Research Assistants in California

“QA professional from fintech/SAP security and complex identity systems who has owned end-to-end testing across the SDLC, including being the sole QA on a high-risk payment platform carrier migration. Demonstrated strength in integration testing, data integrity validation, and diagnosing calculation/automation defects using controlled test data and scripted date emulation; experienced with JIRA/TestRail and Selenium-based regression coverage.”

“Built and shipped a production RAG system (“TROJAN KNOWLEDGE”) for answering questions over technical PDFs, using a 3-stage retrieval stack (BM25 + FAISS + cross-encoder) to lift F1 from 71% to 84%. Drove major performance gains with a 3-level cache (memory/Redis/disk) cutting latency from ~200ms to ~10ms, and added Prometheus/Grafana monitoring plus LangChain-based fallback logic to handle OpenAI rate limits under load.”

Tiffany Utvaer Gasser

Screened ReferencesModerate rec.

Mid-level Software Developer specializing in FinTech

Foster City, CA4y exp

“Software engineer with experience in a large financial institution, including ownership of an internal queue-based service and upgrades to an online credit dispute flow. Stands out for combining backend reliability work, stakeholder collaboration with bank operations staff, and a pragmatic focus on validation, monitoring, and developer experience.”

Kirill Aristarkhov

Screened

Junior Software Engineer specializing in full-stack, AI/ML systems, and game development

Santa Barbara, CA3y exp

“Full-stack engineer (React/TypeScript + Bun/Node-like backend) who recently rebuilt a terminal-based chat UI, implementing custom Markdown lex/parse/render and a typewriter-style streaming renderer while optimizing React DOM growth for ~50% faster performance. Has startup experience making high-ownership decisions under ambiguity and rapidly integrating multiple external AI/tooling services (5–6 in a week) with fallback strategies for flaky dependencies.”

Raj Kale

Screened

Junior Software Engineer specializing in full-stack systems and FinTech

Los Angeles, CA3y exp

“Full-stack engineer with experience building financial and hiring-product systems, spanning React/TypeScript dashboards, Flask/Kafka/Postgres backends, and multi-tenant configuration for 3,000+ clients. Stands out for combining deep technical debugging and performance work with product-minded UX improvements, including a 41% lift in resume matching accuracy and ~40% latency reduction through batching and query tuning.”

Manali Patil

Screened

Senior Software Engineer & Engineering Manager specializing in cloud backend and manufacturing MES

Santa Clara, CA9y exp

“Customer-facing engineer who led recurring midnight ERP data-feed/B2B integrations from prototype to production, building reusable APIs and using Hangfire for job scheduling. Known for tight weekly customer iteration, strong documentation and test coverage (80%+), and cross-functional problem-solving with Operations/Quality/NPI to resolve data-collection and manufacturing-process constraints; has 2 customers live on the integration.”

“Backend/DevX engineer with startup experience who built internal JavaScript SDKs for POS integrations, including a daily GMV calculation feature standardized across multiple POS providers. Strong in performance debugging (used Jaeger to resolve legacy WebSocket bottlenecks) and developer enablement—built a cronjob migration tool (ArgoWorkflow to internal platform) with documentation that let teams migrate in ~30 seconds, plus handled on-call and internal support.”

“Enterprise customer success/implementation leader focused on AI-driven operational intelligence deployments in complex environments (e.g., large international airports). Has led end-to-end rollouts across 1200+ camera feeds and multiple airport systems, driving adoption stabilization within 90 days, influencing product roadmap (configurable alerts), and partnering with Sales to expand from initial congestion monitoring into additional operational modules.”

Jarin Tasnim

Screened

Staff/Lead Software Engineer specializing in distributed data and ML platforms

Mountain View, CA6y exp

“Defense-domain AI engineer who built a production ReAct-style RAG system for military training data/material generation, scaling to ~1000 users and cutting generation time by 50%. Also has experience designing GPU-cluster parallel computation with PyTorch and handling production incidents involving database performance and schema design.”