Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“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).”

Jesse Olson

Screened

Executive AI technology leader specializing in agentic AI and enterprise transformation

22y exp

“Candidate is exploring a startup in the autonomous agentic AI space and is approaching it with a disciplined founder mindset. They are evaluating market opportunity, competition, customer pain, ROI, technical feasibility, and MVP options while already speaking with potential customers across verticals to validate needs and buying processes.”

“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%+.”

Somya Upadhyay

Screened

Senior Software Engineer specializing in cloud infrastructure and large-scale data pipelines

Bellevue, USA9y exp

“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).”

Muneendra M

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in event-driven backend and AI-enabled systems

San Francisco, CA4y exp

“Full-stack engineer at Stripe who owned a webhook monitoring and retry platform end-to-end, spanning backend services, React dashboards, and production operations. Stands out for combining strong distributed-systems judgment with product polish, including a reported 31% improvement in webhook delivery reliability and UI improvements that reduced support burden.”