Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“Backend/ML platform engineer with Google experience leading Python microservices for an AI-driven recommendation/retrieval system, including PyTorch inference and a retrieval-augmented generation workflow. Strong in production Kubernetes + GitOps (ArgoCD), real-time Kafka/Spark pipelines, and phased on-prem/legacy to AWS/GCP cloud migrations with reliability-focused rollout and rollback practices.”

“Meta engineer who owned end-to-end production systems for AI-enabled smart glasses, spanning React/TypeScript apps through Node/Java microservices on AWS EKS with Kafka/Postgres. Built and productionized a real-time RAG pipeline (LangChain + OpenAI + Elasticsearch) with rigorous guardrails (shadow/canary, fallbacks, monitoring), delivering major improvements in latency (~35–40%), error reduction (~30%), and engagement (reported +40% DAU).”

“Backend/platform engineer who has owned real-time reporting and streaming analytics systems end-to-end, combining FastAPI/Postgres APIs with Kafka consumers, Celery background jobs, and Redis caching. Strong DevOps/GitOps experience deploying Python/Node microservices to AWS EKS with Helm, ArgoCD/FluxCD, and CI pipelines, and has supported phased on-prem to AWS migrations using Terraform and traffic cutovers.”

“Engineering leader who drove Lightroom Mobile’s roadmap at Adobe by enforcing reuse of Photoshop imaging tech to deliver RAW, non-destructive mobile editing with full Creative Cloud compatibility. In startup environments, has repeatedly scaled and professionalized engineering orgs (career ladders, evaluation systems, delivery process) and led high-stakes cloud/platform transformations—migrating off Heroku and consolidating fragmented AWS/GCP usage into a single GCP platform—improving reliability, deploy speed, and cutting cloud costs by 20%+.”

“Backend engineer on Amazon’s Geospatial Data team (Amazon Maps) who built a real-time road-layer service ingesting third-party and internal signals to deliver road closures/traffic overlays to delivery drivers on a ~3-minute cadence while minimizing mobile data egress. Demonstrates strong production reliability skills (rate limiting, idempotency, cache stampede prevention) and security depth (IAM, RBAC, tenant row-level security), plus careful handling of edge cases like manual override protection against automated feed overwrites.”

“Built and deployed a production LLM conversational AI system at OpenAI supporting chat, summarization, and semantic search at 1M+ requests/day, driving major latency (40%) and accuracy (25%) improvements through Pinecone optimization and tighter RAG with re-ranking. Also has Amazon experience improving recommendation systems by translating ML metrics into business terms to boost CTR and conversions, with strong MLOps/orchestration depth (Airflow, MLflow, SageMaker, Kubeflow).”