Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“Hands-on engineering manager at a marketing company leading a highly senior, distributed team (10 direct reports) while personally coding ~60–70% and owning end-to-end architecture across three interconnected products. Built agentic CRM automation and a reinforcement-learning-driven distribution layer for channel spend/bidding, with a strong focus on scalable design and observability (Prometheus/APM/logging) enabling frequent releases and few production incidents.”

Vigynesh Bhatt

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in backend, cloud, and ML systems

Salt Lake City, UT4y exp

“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.”

Kaustubh Rai

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in distributed systems and cloud-native microservices

PA, USA2y exp

“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.”

Andrew Fares

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-level Data Engineer specializing in AI, GenAI, and cloud data platforms

Seattle, WA4y exp

“Built production AI systems inside AWS finance/procurement, including an LLM-based supplier quote classification and price-vetting workflow that drove $5M in savings over 3 months. Combines GenAI evaluation expertise, internal platform design, and reusable Python data-quality tooling with strong cross-functional execution across finance, accounting, and hardware engineering.”

“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).”

Lawrence Cheng

Screened

Mid-Level Backend Software Engineer specializing in FinTech platforms

San Francisco Bay Area, CA6y exp

“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.”

Ashi Sinha

Screened

Junior Software Engineer specializing in full-stack and ML/NLP systems

New York City, NY2y exp

“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.”

Gaurav Narasimhan

Screened

Executive AI platform leader specializing in autonomous agent systems for enterprise SaaS

Redwood City, CA26y exp

“Real estate entrepreneur who has previously raised capital from friends and family and has engaged directly with VC firms including A16z. Demonstrates unusually strong founder commitment, having worked two full-time jobs for the past six years while pursuing entrepreneurial goals, with hypothesys.ai described as the outcome.”

Nagsen Dahat

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in FinTech platforms and cloud-native systems

New York, NY18y exp

“Motivated by the desire to work independently after spending significant time working for others. Demonstrated notable discipline and follow-through by completing a Master's program with great grades while managing a full-time job, family with two children, and a social life.”

Shailaja Domala

Screened

Executive product and data leader specializing in AI, analytics, and FinTech platforms

California, USA24y exp

“Senior product leader with 15 years of people management experience who has built AI-driven products from 0 to 1, including a no-code ML platform for citizen data scientists and data/insight products at Visa. Brings a rare mix of fintech, AI/ML, UX, and platform thinking, plus a strong human-centered AI perspective shaped by ethical AI work and mentoring underserved college graduates in India.”

Kaushik Sriram

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in event-driven FinTech backend systems

San Francisco, CA5y exp

“Senior/Staff-level backend/platform engineer who owned Stripe’s global payout settlement system end-to-end, building an event-driven Python/Kafka platform processing millions of events daily across 30+ countries. Deep experience operating high-reliability distributed systems in production (incidents, replays/backfills, schema evolution, observability) and scaling on AWS/EKS with strong testing and deployment practices.”

“Candidate is a hands-on engineer using AI as a controlled coding partner rather than an autonomous decision-maker. They have practical experience designing and leading structured multi-agent coding pipelines with specialized roles for code generation, review, and test coverage, and show strong judgment around reliability through schemas, guardrails, reviewer gates, and manual validation.”

“AI/ML engineer with experience spanning Accenture healthcare NLP systems, academic research, and Apple on-device LLM integration. Stands out for owning regulated production pipelines end-to-end—from HIPAA-compliant clinical NLP and EHR integrations to incident prevention, experiment tracking, and optimized on-device inference with LLaMA 3.”