Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“Meta engineer who emphasizes AI-native development workflows, using Claude Code heavily to ship UI and performance fixes quickly. Notable examples include a location-aware ad relevance feature that increased CTR and revenue, and a vehicle insights chatbot whose UX improved through metric-driven prompt tuning.”

“Engineer with experience at Reddit working on high-scale backend and infrastructure problems, including API redesign for products serving 150M+ daily active users. They also built a production AI agent for automated bug triage with 97% accuracy and substantial time savings, and have hands-on full-stack/AI side-project experience using React, TypeScript, Supabase, and LLMs.”

“Engineer with startup experience at a Series B company, where they worked through high ambiguity and personally led an observers feature for a video conferencing platform. They also bring B2B SaaS experience building feature-flagged, permission-sensitive products for customers ranging from startups to large enterprises, plus migration experience moving an acquired app from .NET into a React/Next.js ecosystem.”

“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.”

Zahaan Khan

Screened

Mid-Level Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in ads transparency platforms

San Jose, USA6y exp

“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.”

“Atlassian ML/AI engineer who has shipped end-to-end production systems combining classical ML, streaming infrastructure, and LLM-based personalization to improve onboarding and free-to-paid conversion. Particularly strong in turning research-style RAG and reranking ideas into low-latency, reliable product systems with robust evaluation, safety guardrails, and reusable platform services for other teams.”

“Software engineer who has deeply integrated AI into day-to-day development, using Claude Code, ChatGPT, and coding agents to speed up boilerplate generation, system design, and tradeoff analysis. Stands out for a pragmatic multi-model workflow focused on faster delivery and quicker architectural feedback.”

Timothy Lee

Screened

Senior Full-Stack Engineer specializing in AI platforms and scalable web systems

Live Oak, FL12y exp

“Built and shipped production agentic/LLM systems that could safely perform real customer and subscription operations, not just answer questions. Demonstrates unusually strong depth in agent orchestration, tool safety, evals, tracing, and backend workflow design across Node.js/TypeScript, Go, Redis, Postgres, Kafka, and GPT-4.”

“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.”

“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.”

YAKKALI PAVAN

Screened

Mid-level Machine Learning & Generative AI Engineer specializing in NLP, CV, and RAG systems

USA6y exp

“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.”

Shahmeer Malik

Screened

Junior Software Development Engineer specializing in cloud security and CI/CD

Herndon, VA2y exp

“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.”

Bennett Smith

Screened

Senior Full-Stack Engineer specializing in cloud-native microservices and React

Los Angeles, CA14y exp

“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).”

Rohini Rajagopalan

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in SaaS, Cloud Migration, and Cybersecurity

Santa clara, CA8y exp

“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.”

Durgaprasad G

Screened

Mid-level AI/ML Engineer specializing in LLM infrastructure, RAG, and agentic systems

New York City, NY3y exp

“Stripe engineer who owned and unified multiple team RAG systems into a shared production platform used by 200+ internal operators, deployed on EKS with Kafka ingestion and hybrid retrieval. Drove measurable business outcomes including <400ms latency, ~35% inference cost reduction, ~25% accuracy lift via fine-tuning, and real-time auto-approval of 80%+ merchant compliance applications through strong observability and reliability patterns.”

“Fintech engineer with high-ownership startup experience at Column, where they led a Go rewrite of a core banking API that cut transaction errors by 98% and increased throughput by 40%. Brings a rare mix of backend systems depth in compliance-sensitive money movement infrastructure and frontend platform experience building React design systems, with earlier experience at Meta on recommendation APIs and News Feed.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

Sandeep Rohilla

Screened

Principal Backend/Platform Engineer specializing in GenAI agent orchestration and LLM pipelines

San Francisco, CA19y exp

“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.”

“Built and shipped production AI systems spanning customer support automation at Uber, privacy-preserving federated health modeling on iOS, and an open-source semantic search layer for Postgres. Stands out for combining strong LLM/product instincts with rigorous eval design, measurable production impact, and zero-to-one execution across backend, mobile, and developer infrastructure.”

ALEXANDER SHEYNER

Screened

Executive IT & Enterprise Architecture leader specializing in portfolio transformation, data/AI, and M&A

Boston, MA35y exp

“Fractional CTO supporting early-stage teams in the UAE and Ukraine to build platforms using an "Agentic OS" approach—one focused on reducing friction across patient/provider/payor engagement and another on enforcing transparency for international rebuilding investments to reduce fraud. Also exploring an alternative-energy feedstock plantation opportunity in Armenia with multi-industry downstream revenue potential; has created project-specific investor pitch decks and is actively engaging potential investors.”