Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“Built and shipped a map-embedding SDK (published to npm) for Walmart apps, solving key performance issues with real-time streaming (WebSockets) and Canvas rendering while prioritizing developer experience. Also applies LLM/agentic patterns in production workflows—using diagnostic agents and human-in-the-loop escalation to detect and resolve issues (e.g., voice agent loops caused by RAG API failures). Has sales-engineering experience supporting enterprise renewals, including a million-dollar contract renewal while at Siemens working with Ford stakeholders.”

“Full-stack engineer with experience at Zoho and Amazon who has owned production systems end-to-end, including a monolith-to-microservices migration using Kafka and Cassandra that improved search latency ~25% and increased throughput without data loss. Also built a hackathon project (Buildwise) into a sold product for a construction company (AI-driven document compliance checks) and shipped an IoT-based parking availability MVP in 3 weeks.”

“AI/ML engineer who has deployed production LLM/transformer-based systems for merchant intelligence and fraud/support optimization, delivering +27% merchant engagement and +18% payment success. Deep experience in privacy-preserving, PCI DSS-compliant data/ML pipelines (Airflow, AWS Glue, Spark, Delta Lake) and scalable microservices on Kubernetes, plus proven cross-functional delivery in healthcare claims analytics at UnitedHealth Group (12% HEDIS claim reduction).”

“Backend engineer who built a low-latency real-time transaction API in Python/Flask, with strong depth in PostgreSQL/SQLAlchemy performance tuning (time-based partitioning, indexing, connection pooling). Has production experience integrating ML scoring and OpenAI-style APIs with safety/latency controls, and designing multi-tenant isolation strategies including per-tenant pooling/caching and premium-tenant isolation.”

“CTO-level technology leader with experience building end-to-end tech strategy and roadmaps, modernizing legacy environments in healthcare (GenesisCare), and scaling engineering into large global teams (Amadeus). Built a DevOps organization at Syniverse for the Visibility Suite, implementing Kubernetes/Terraform/Chef automation that drove ~75% faster deployments, and is known for staying hands-on (including data center work) while leading strategically.”

“Software engineer focused on data platforms and applied LLM systems: built an internal data quality monitoring layer to catch silent data drift and iterated post-launch after finding ~30% false-positive alerts, reducing noise via dynamic baselines and improved structured logging. Also shipped a production RAG-based internal knowledge assistant over Jira/Confluence with citations, confidence-based fallbacks, and nightly automated evals to prevent regressions.”

“Data engineer focused on large-scale ETL/ELT pipelines across cloud stacks (GCP and AWS), including Spark-based transformations and orchestration with Airflow. Has experience loading up to ~2TB per BigQuery target table and designing atomic loads to multiple downstream systems (Elasticsearch + Kafka), with Kubernetes deployment and Jenkins CI/CD.”

“Backend/full-stack engineer (5+ years) with Shopify experience integrating LLM/RAG workflows into production APIs. Owned a Python TensorFlow Serving inference pipeline connected to Java microservices via gRPC, optimizing tail latency at ~10k concurrent load and improving retrieval relevance with embedding and evaluation work. Strong Kubernetes/EKS + GitOps/CI/CD background, including monolith-to-microservices migrations and event-driven streaming patterns.”

“Ticketmaster data engineer who built CDC-driven Kafka pipelines feeding Snowflake for analytics and data science teams. Hands-on in production operations—scaled Kafka during sudden playoff-driven transaction spikes and improved monitoring for preemptive scaling. Known for using small-batch experiments and quantitative metrics to align stakeholders and drive cost-saving architecture changes (e.g., buffering to reduce AWS Lambda invocation frequency).”

“Backend/platform engineer with deep payments experience who built and operated a real-time transaction routing service end-to-end on AWS (Spring Boot, PostgreSQL/RDS, Redis, Kubernetes), delivering ~40% latency reduction and 99.99% uptime via strong resiliency and observability practices. Also productionized an internal LLM-powered RAG knowledge assistant with guardrails and a user-feedback-driven evaluation loop, and has led incremental monolith-to-microservices modernization using Strangler Fig and shadow traffic.”

“Backend engineer with experience at UnitedHealth Group redesigning a high-traffic Spring Boot microservice from blocking to reactive architecture during peak season, cutting median latency by 47% for a service used by ~10M customers annually. Strong in Kubernetes-based deployment/scaling and pragmatic rollout strategies (blue-green/incremental traffic shifting) with performance and database troubleshooting.”

“Teradata Text Security intern who built a production LLM-powered planner agent that decomposes complex tasks into dependency-aware subtasks (DAG/topological graph) and executes them via a custom orchestrator with parallelism, status tracking, and error handling. Also contributed to an HR-facing internal document chatbot concept to streamline onboarding, showing cross-functional collaboration.”

“Backend engineer who built a real-time pipeline for recording, transcribing, and analyzing audio from 400+ news radio stations, scaling Whisper on an HPC cluster with 7 H100 GPUs. Has strong performance optimization experience (30% latency reduction via SQL/query design; 50% DB call reduction via Redis caching) and has implemented region-based data isolation and PII protections in a regulated environment (JP Morgan Chase).”

“SRE-focused engineer with experience at Sony Interactive Entertainment productionizing high-throughput LLM/agentic systems on Kubernetes, including GPU-aware autoscaling and warm-pool strategies to manage latency and cost under traffic spikes. Demonstrates strong incident response using Prometheus/Grafana + Jaeger tracing (e.g., resolving recursive agent loops and restoring 99.9% availability within minutes) and partners closely with sales/customer teams through PoV demos and developer workshops.”

“Backend engineer from Palantir who built and productionized an enterprise LLM-based document intelligence/search platform, evolving it into a hybrid lexical+vector retrieval system. Emphasizes reliability and cost control via strict LLM gating, robust fallback paths, and evaluation frameworks (e.g., MMLU/BLEU), plus disciplined migration practices (feature flags, dual-writes, shadow reads) to ship changes safely at scale.”