Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“Software engineer with experience across Goldman Sachs, BYU Broadcasting, Juniper Networks, and an edtech startup (Doubtnut), spanning data migrations, AWS-based media backends, and microservices observability. Built a Redis/ElastiCache caching layer in front of DynamoDB/S3 to improve media delivery latency and cost, and created an SEO indexing automation tool using the Google Search Console API that saved ~15–30 person-hours per day.”

“Software engineer with ~2 years at UnitedHealth Group plus CMU coursework/TA experience, spanning backend modernization and cloud-native operations. Worked on migrating a customized open-source EDI system from Python 2 to Python 3 while improving SQLite database traceability via JSON exports, and has hands-on Kubernetes microservices deployment on Azure using Helm, HPA, and Jenkins-based Git-triggered CI/CD. Also built a large-scale real-time ride-hailing simulation using Kafka + Samza with explicit fault-tolerance strategies.”

“Backend/platform-focused engineer who builds scalable onboarding and data ingestion pipelines for complex client data formats, emphasizing staged validation, idempotent job boundaries, and safe rollouts behind feature flags. Strong in production diagnostics (Kibana/Logstash, SQL, debugger traces) with a concrete example of finding a regression causing incorrect Tax Loss Harvesting alert counts within a day, and experienced enabling both engineers and customer-facing teams through docs, runbooks, and technical walkthroughs.”

“Backend/data engineer focused on production ML/LLM systems: built a real-time FastAPI inference API on Kubernetes with strong reliability patterns (timeouts, idempotent retries, centralized error handling). Delivered AWS platforms using EKS + Lambda with GitHub Actions/Helm CI/CD and built Glue-based ETL from S3/Kafka into Snowflake with schema evolution and data-quality controls; also modernized legacy analytics/recommendation workflows into Python services with safe, feature-flagged cutovers.”

“Engineering leader (12+ years Director, 17 years lead) focused on developer productivity and platform/framework work across Oracle, PlayStation, Workday, and CafePress. Notable for building distributed teams from scratch and delivering high-impact platform architecture—e.g., re-architected PlayStation’s upload pipeline to support 500GB–5TB submissions using browser-to-AWS chunked uploads with SNS/SQS and deduplication/resume support.”

“ML/LLM engineer who has built and productionized a large multimodal LLM pipeline end-to-end—fine-tuning a 20B+ parameter model with distributed/FSDP training and deploying on Kubernetes via Triton for ~5x throughput. Strong focus on reliability and safety (monitoring with SHAP, guardrails, A/B testing) with reported ~22% relevance lift and reduced harmful/incorrect outputs, plus experience orchestrating ETL/retraining workflows with Airflow across S3/Snowflake/RDS.”

“Built and deployed a production LLM-powered clinical support assistant at BJC HealthCare (RAG + transformer) to answer patient questions, summarize clinical notes, and support appointment workflows. Implemented PHI-safe data pipelines (Spark/Hadoop/Kafka) with automated scrubbing, dataset versioning, and audit logs, and runs the system on Docker/Kubernetes with Pinecone vector search while partnering closely with clinical operations staff.”

“Amazon Alexa engineer who architected and shipped a GenAI Knowledge Agent used by 2M+ customers, focused on making LLM outputs auditable via citations and a verification layer that prevents hallucinations. Built the full vertical slice (FastAPI/LangChain backend + React/TypeScript streaming UI) while keeping p99 latency under 200ms, and has proven incident response experience on AWS (Lambda/DynamoDB scaling issues).”

“Entry-level full-stack engineer with internship experience at Amazon (Appstore IAP flow + uninstall recommendation workflow) and a health-tech startup (OneVector) where they built a DSUR reporting workflow end-to-end, including document generation, S3-backed versioning/metadata, and secure preview/download. Demonstrates strong production debugging and reliability mindset (instrumentation, deterministic retrieval, idempotent writes) and focuses on UX/performance in high-stakes user flows.”

“Backend/data-platform engineer with Stripe and Salesforce experience focused on global payouts/treasury systems. Built an end-to-end payout settlement monitoring platform (FastAPI microservices, Kafka/Spark streaming, React dashboard, CloudWatch alerting) that cut settlement delays 25% and reconciliation time 30%, and productionized an ML anomaly detection service that reduced missed issues by 30%. Experienced modernizing monoliths into microservices with feature flags/canaries and close partnership with treasury/risk/CTO stakeholders.”

“Senior data/AI and platform leader with Walmart- and T-Mobile-scale architecture experience, including building real-time inventory + forecasting platforms (Kafka/Cassandra/Hadoop) and Azure IoT systems. Known for translating board-level business goals into roadmaps that deliver measurable impact (e.g., $50M savings and $250M profit in a year; +2% conversion via Customer 360) and for hands-on problem solving in ML/forecasting (feature reduction and LASSO).”

“AI/LLM engineer who built and productionized an internal RAG-based knowledge system that ingests diverse sources (PDFs, Markdown, Slack), scaled retrieval with distributed FAISS and parallel ingestion, and reduced hallucinations via re-ranking, grounding prompts, and post-generation validation. Also has hands-on orchestration experience with Airflow and Kubernetes for reliable ETL/model pipelines, monitoring, and staged rollouts; reports ~15% accuracy improvement and adoption as the primary internal knowledge tool.”

“Engineering leader with experience building point-of-care diagnostics platforms (IoT-connected PCR device delivering results in <15 minutes) and scaling multidisciplinary teams (55+). Has led major data/IoT architecture decisions (multi-cluster Kubernetes with secure routing; Kafka + Gobblin over MQTT) and runs execution with Agile roadmaps tightly aligned to GTM and senior leadership.”

“TikTok engineer (4 years) who built and owned multiple ad transparency platforms used by internal teams and advertisers worldwide. Strong full-stack profile spanning Next.js/TypeScript + Redux frontends, a secure/optimized BFF layer, and event-driven backend workflows (Kafka, retries/DLQ, Redis idempotency) with heavy emphasis on observability and performance; cites a 20% moderation efficiency gain on a modernized legacy tool.”

“Backend/data engineer with strong AWS production experience spanning high-traffic FastAPI APIs (Postgres/Redis/Kafka) and serverless+container deployments (Lambda/ECS) managed via Terraform and CI/CD. Has built Glue-based data lake ETL (S3 Parquet, Athena/Redshift) with schema drift/data quality controls, modernized legacy batch systems via parallel-run parity validation, and demonstrated measurable SQL performance wins (60–90s down to 3–5s).”

“Built and deployed a production LLM-powered RAG document intelligence system used by non-technical enterprise stakeholders, cutting document search time by 40%+ while improving answer consistency. Demonstrates strong MLOps/data workflow orchestration (Airflow, AWS Step Functions, managed schedulers across GCP/Azure) and a metrics-driven approach to reliability, evaluation, and cost/latency optimization with guardrails and observability.”

“Senior engineering leader with experience at Cisco, Amazon, and startup Shopkick, operating at high scale (e.g., Secure Web Gateway handling ~40M QPS). Known for measurable impact across reliability and cost (85% efficacy improvement; Datadog spend cut from ~$500k/month to ~$15k/month) and for leading complex platform modernization (1-year monolith-to-microservices/event-driven migration with zero customer impact) plus compatibility-focused API design that cut device onboarding from a month to a day.”

“ML/LLM engineer with Stripe and Adobe experience who productionized a transformer-based Payments Foundation Model for real-time fraud detection at global scale (billions of transactions). Built petabyte-scale ETL/feature pipelines (Spark/EMR, Airflow, dbt, Kafka/Flink) and achieved <100ms multi-region inference (EKS, TorchServe, edge/Lambda, GPU/CPU routing) with strong PCI-DSS/GDPR compliance and explainability (SHAP/LIME), reporting a 64% fraud accuracy improvement.”

“Backend/security-focused engineer supporting a service with 100k+ monthly users. Built an automated load-testing suite that reproduced and mitigated catastrophic host failures from oversized SCP/rsync transfers via host-level throttling, and proposed a future sharding approach for very large transfers. Also created an internal agent to summarize anomalous metrics and provide ready-to-run debug queries, significantly reducing ops review time.”

“End-to-end product engineer who built and shipped Shopify Magic, an LLM-powered product-description generator on Amazon Bedrock with RAG over a tenant-isolated vector database, achieving 50% faster content creation, sub-2s latency, and 70%+ merchant adoption. Also led a Flexport migration from a monolithic Rails app to microservices using feature flags and parallel runs, delivering zero downtime and a 60% improvement in development speed.”

“LLM-focused engineer/sales-engineering profile with hands-on experience productionizing complex systems: scalable distributed architecture, multi-tenant monitoring, canary/shadow rollouts, and robust fallback strategies. Demonstrated real-time troubleshooting depth (p99 latency spikes traced to DB connection limits causing retry storms) and strong developer-facing communication via RAG workshops and live, customer-specific demos that helped close deals quickly.”

“ML/NLP engineer with experience building production-grade legal-tech and data platforms, including a GPT-4/LangChain contract review system using ElasticSearch embeddings (RAG) deployed on AWS EKS. Strong in entity resolution and scalable batch/streaming pipelines (Kafka/Spark), with measurable impact (70%+ reduction in contract review time) and a focus on monitoring and CI/CD for reliable delivery.”

“Backend/platform engineer with deep AWS experience who built a high-reliability ingestion platform (Lambda + Step Functions + DynamoDB) that became the single source of truth for training/qualification certification data across an AU region, handling high-volume async updates with strong consistency controls. Also led a major API migration from Lambda to ECS/Fargate to eliminate cold starts and increase throughput, and has hands-on EKS/Kubernetes operations plus Kafka partitioning/ordering expertise.”

“Engineering leader in cloud security at SysTech with player-coach experience spanning cross-team data/ownership standardization and reporting platform user-journey improvements. Stays technically deep through observability (SLA/SLOs, dashboards, alerting), rigorous code reviews (including AI-assisted coding), and end-to-end incident ownership in IAM/agentless cloud event collection. Targeting $270K–$300K base plus bonus/equity.”