Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“Founding AI engineer at an AI SaaS startup who built the full GTM knowledge and retrieval stack for non-technical teams, driving 60% less manual effort and 25% faster deployments. Also brings enterprise B2B SaaS integration experience from Wipro, including external API/documentation work for large-scale partner ecosystems.”

Likitha Kukunarapu

Screened References

Mid-level Applied AI Engineer specializing in data engineering and healthcare AI

Remote, USA3y exp

“Built production LLM agents spanning document Q&A, financial insight generation, and ERP-like operational data workflows, with a strong focus on reliability, grounding, and evaluation. Stands out for translating LLM systems into measurable business outcomes, including 70%–80% support workload reduction and a fallback-rate improvement from 18% to 8% through targeted RAG iteration.”

“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.”

Bhavesh Ittadwar

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Senior Full-Stack Engineer specializing in scalable web and cloud systems

USA3y exp

“JavaScript engineer who built a Michelin-specific headless CMS forms platform based on apostrophe-forms, powering forms across 400+ Michelin websites. Designed an extensible, SOLID-aligned modular field architecture with a shared design system, cutting hundreds of lines of per-project code across 10+ implementations while driving cross-device compatibility and performance (BrowserStack, Lighthouse, SSR).”

“Robotics intern at the University of Delaware who built and debugged ROS2-based multi-robot coordination systems, focusing on real-time reliability (timestamp alignment, latency/jitter instrumentation, QoS/executor tuning). Also improved SLAM stability by fixing LiDAR/encoder synchronization and tuning state-estimation parameters, with a simulation-first workflow using Gazebo and Docker/CI for reproducible deployments.”

“Backend/platform engineer who has owned a real-time data ingestion/processing/reporting API built with FastAPI, Redis, and Celery, including performance tuning via query/index optimization, caching, and async workers. Strong Kubernetes + CI/CD + GitOps (ArgoCD) experience, plus hands-on monitoring/logging (Prometheus/Grafana/ELK) and a Kafka/Spark real-time streaming project from their master’s program.”

“Software engineer with JPMorgan Chase experience building a real-time operations console backend on Spring Boot/Kafka/Kubernetes and resolving peak-load latency through profiling, indexing, caching, and async processing. Also built and owned an AI-driven digital-archives metadata pipeline during a master’s at UNT using OCR + LLaMA-based prompting with validation, near-human accuracy, and human-in-the-loop guardrails.”

“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.”

“Bootstrapped founder/fractional-CTO type building a community-first tooling platform and niche product lab, emphasizing trust and "family" culture. Operates extremely lean by self-hosting open-source LLM tooling locally and leverages a network of senior generalists willing to trade short-term compensation for learning and equity. Has worked across real estate tech, logistics, and hospitality POS and is applying a multi-modal "brain trails" concept to product opportunities.”

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.”

“Software engineer with hands-on experience shipping production AI agents and end-to-end ecommerce workflows. They built a customer support automation agent with strong guardrails and evaluation practices, then improved it post-launch using real user data to cut latency ~30% and token cost ~25%. Also drove a zero-to-one self-serve order modification product across React UI, backend services, and cross-functional alignment.”

“Backend/platform engineer who owned an end-to-end financial data ingestion and validation system (Python/Django/FastAPI, Postgres, AWS), including large-file performance tuning, auditability, and CI/CD. Strong Kubernetes/EKS + ArgoCD GitOps practitioner and has delivered both Kafka-based real-time transaction streaming and a legacy on-prem stack migration to AWS (ECS Fargate, RDS, S3, Secrets Manager) with controlled cutovers and data consistency validation.”

Sandeep Gandhi

Screened

Executive technology leader specializing in FinTech, identity, and AI-native platforms

San Ramon, CA26y exp

“Current CTO of Idmission leading a 150+ person engineering organization, with deep experience scaling delivery, CI/CD, and architecture modernization. Combines executive leadership with hands-on technical depth across microservices, Kubernetes, and AI systems, including a RAG support platform that reduced resolution time by 50% and passive liveness technology that improved client acquisition by 20%.”

“Backend/platform engineer in healthcare and consulting (Molina Healthcare, TCS) who productionized real-time eligibility/authorization and care navigation workflows with strong reliability and HIPAA security. Demonstrated measurable performance gains (≈40% latency reduction, ~99% uptime) using Spring Boot APIs, SQS decoupling, Redis caching, and deep observability, and regularly leads technical demos that accelerate client adoption.”

“AI/LLM engineer with healthcare domain experience who built a production clinical support “chart bot” for Molina, including PHI-safe ingestion of 200k+ PDF policies, vector retrieval, and a fine-tuned LLaMA served via vLLM on ECS Fargate. Demonstrated measurable performance wins (HNSW + namespace partitioning; 30% inference latency reduction) and a rigorous evaluation/monitoring approach, while partnering closely with nurses and operations teams to shape workflows and guardrails.”

“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.”

“Backend engineer from insurance/enterprise platforms with a focus on high-performance, real-time, event-driven microservices. Brings strong distributed-systems communication design plus mature testing, Docker containerization, and CI/CD practices; no direct robotics/ROS experience.”