Vetted Apache Hadoop Professionals

“Data/ML engineer in financial services (Northern Trust) who built a production RAG-based LLM system to connect structured transaction/portfolio data with unstructured market and internal documents for risk teams. Strong in end-to-end pipelines (AWS Glue/Airflow/PySpark), entity resolution, and taking models from prototype to reliable daily production with performance tuning (LoRA + TensorRT) and monitoring.”

“Built and productionized an internal GenAI chatbot that makes company policy/SOP knowledge instantly searchable, using a secure RAG architecture on AWS (Bedrock/Titan embeddings/OpenSearch Serverless, Textract/Lambda/S3 ingestion, Claude 3 Sonnet). Demonstrates strong MLOps/orchestration experience (Airflow, Step Functions with Lambda/Glue/SageMaker) and a rigorous reliability approach (RAGAS metrics, A/B testing, citation validation, monitoring), including collaboration with compliance stakeholders via review dashboards.”

“AI Software Engineer (student employee) at University of Washington IT who helped deploy "Purple," a governed, explainable LLM platform on Azure used by 100,000+ students/faculty/staff. Independently led scalable reliability efforts by building automated agent quality/load/red-team testing and CI/CD health validation (Playwright/Node.js, Azure DevOps), and previously built an explainable AI scheduling assistant for clinical operations at Proliance Surgeons.”

“ML/AI engineer with hands-on ownership of production recommendation and GenAI systems, spanning experimentation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration. Stands out for delivering measurable outcomes—22% CTR lift, 15% conversion lift, and a 30% reduction in support tickets—while demonstrating strong judgment on latency, cost, and safety tradeoffs in real-world systems.”

Preetham Dandu

Screened ReferencesModerate rec.

Junior Software Engineer specializing in backend, distributed systems, and cloud platforms

Stony Brook, NY1y exp

“MS candidate with strong backend/data engineering focus who builds research and data systems with production-grade rigor (reproducibility, observability, restartability). Has hands-on experience securing and scaling FastAPI-based gateways in front of Java microservices, leading SQL Server→Snowflake migrations with dual-write/feature-flag rollouts, and hardening Kafka-based fleet-tracking systems against out-of-order and duplicate events.”

Shane Weinstock

Screened

Senior Data Scientist & Product Analytics Leader specializing in ML and experimentation

Austin, TX17y exp

“Aspiring founder with ~15 years of experience across varied backgrounds, motivated by frustration with slow, change-resistant large organizations and a desire to bring innovative ideas to market. Familiar with how venture capital/accelerators function (though not directly worked in them) and expresses strong willingness to take entrepreneurial risks.”

“Backend Python engineer focused on production-grade automation and reliability, with hands-on experience designing scalable API systems on PostgreSQL and making pragmatic architecture calls (modular monolith over premature microservices). Demonstrated measurable performance wins (50–60% latency reduction) and strong operational rigor via observability, incremental rollouts/feature flags, and security patterns like JWT + RBAC + database row-level security.”