Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

Aaditya Voruganti

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Junior AI & Software Engineer specializing in robotics and ML infrastructure

2y exp

“Robotics engineer from UIUC’s Intelligent Motion Lab who led the perception stack for a humanoid robotic nurse, fusing camera/LiDAR/IMU on NVIDIA Jetson Orin for real-time localization and scene understanding across six robots. Deep expertise in ROS 2 and edge ML optimization (TensorRT, CUDA, zero-copy), delivering major latency/throughput gains (10 FPS to 22+ FPS) and building fault-tolerant pipelines with gRPC offloading and real-time reliability practices.”

“Senior engineering/CTO-level leader with hands-on delivery of serverless, event-driven cloud governance platforms (deployed across multiple GE business units) and experience building adaptable usage-based billing at UserTesting. Has advised startups (including CaseText during YC) and supported fundraising and acquisition due diligence, including investor materials for a smart cooler custody management system presented to BARDA during Operation Warp Speed.”

“Backend engineer with hands-on experience building Python/Flask microservices using PostgreSQL/SQLAlchemy, JWT auth, Docker, and GitHub Actions CI/CD. Strong in performance and scalability work—migrated heavy processing to Celery/Redis, tuned queries with EXPLAIN ANALYZE and indexing, and delivered 50%+ API latency reduction. Also integrates AI workflows (OpenAI APIs) with batching/caching/fallbacks and has implemented multi-tenant data isolation patterns.”

“Interned at SLB and owned an end-to-end GenAI chatbot deployment for a finance team, including invoice PDF data extraction and an LLM-driven layer (LangGraph/LangChain) that translated natural language to SQL and returned results in natural language. Validated LLM JSON outputs against benchmarks using DeepDiff and deployed the solution via Docker to Kubernetes, managing pods with k9s.”

Surya Teja

Screened

Mid-level Backend/Full-Stack Engineer specializing in AI and FinTech payments

Tempe, AZ4y exp

“Full-stack engineer who has owned an operational reporting/dashboard product end-to-end—building a React UI, designing/implementing FastAPI services, and deploying/operating on AWS. Demonstrates strong performance engineering (Postgres query/index tuning using EXPLAIN ANALYZE) with concrete impact (reports reduced from tens of seconds to a few seconds) and a reliability mindset across observability, migrations, and resilient third-party/ETL integrations.”

Paul Liu

Screened

Senior Software Engineer specializing in cloud-native backend and web/mobile apps

Seattle, WA8y exp

“Backend engineer with Tesla experience building Python-based, serverless microservices for a supply chain portal, including a MongoDB-backed tracking/logging system and a reconciler Lambda to manage retries and failures. Has hands-on Kubernetes (EKS) and GitOps (Argo CD) experience, plus real-time Kafka pipelines for fleet/IoT telemetry and proxy-based migrations from monolith systems to AWS databases.”

Sourabh Jain

Screened

Director of Software Engineering specializing in enterprise Data, ML & AI platforms

Bay Area, CA23y exp

“Former Walmart Director of Software Engineering who left in March 2025 to build products for clients. Recently delivered an LLM/RAG-based UNSPSC classification solution for an MRO client using a multi-stage retrieval + web search + prompt-engineering workflow, and has led large-scale retail forecasting initiatives and high-severity cloud-migration incidents end-to-end.”

“Candidate has developed a disciplined AI-first engineering workflow that combines design docs, prior PR analysis, testing plans, and multi-agent coordination to accelerate delivery without sacrificing quality. They described acting as a tech lead for AI agents, overseeing code structure, business logic, testing, and service contracts, and reported reducing manual coding effort by nearly 80%.”

“Full-stack engineer with a strong mix of real-time product engineering and applied AI experience. Built and deployed a production stock trading simulator on AWS and an LLM-based customer support agent with RAG/tooling, and also shipped a zero-to-one in-store detection feature at Meituan that improved CTR by 7% and conversion by 11%.”

“Backend/data engineer with production experience building FastAPI services with strong reliability patterns (circuit breaker, rate limiting, caching, graceful degradation) and JWT/OAuth2 auth. Has delivered AWS EKS deployments via Terraform with Secrets Manager/IRSA and HPA autoscaling, and built Glue/Spark ETL pipelines on S3 Parquet with schema-evolution and idempotent reruns; also demonstrated measurable SQL tuning impact (20–30s to <10s).”

“Backend/data engineering candidate with Netflix experience designing and migrating analytics platforms from batch to real-time streaming (Kafka/Flink) across AWS and GCP. Delivered measurable improvements (40% lower data delay, 99.9% accuracy) using phased rollouts, automated data validation (Great Expectations), and strong observability (Prometheus/Grafana), and proactively hardened pipelines with idempotency to prevent duplicate Kafka processing.”

“Backend/distributed-systems engineer with Uber experience building real-time telemetry and safety signal pipelines. Strong in Kafka-based event-driven architectures, low-latency processing under peak load, and production reliability via monitoring, retries, and fallback logic; has Docker/Kubernetes and CI/CD deployment experience.”

Yeshwanth Sai Pala

Screened

Mid-level Full-Stack Developer specializing in cloud microservices and AI-driven FinTech

Remote, USA4y exp

“Stripe engineer who shipped an end-to-end merchant fraud insights dashboard, spanning Spring Boot/Kafka risk-scoring services and a React+TypeScript UI. Focused on low-latency, high-volume transaction processing and production operations on AWS (EKS/CloudWatch), including handling a real traffic-spike latency incident via query optimization, indexing, and rate limiting.”

Likhitha Bethi

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in backend systems, distributed systems, and applied AI

Stony Brook, NY4y exp

“Goldman Sachs engineer who owned end-to-end features for an internal onboarding and case management platform, spanning React/TypeScript UI, a GraphQL gateway, and Node + Spring WebFlux microservices. Built and operated a Kafka-based ingestion and search pipeline with DLQs, retries, idempotency, and strong observability, and improved developer experience via backward-compatible GraphQL API design and schema-driven documentation.”

“Built and shipped a production agentic RAG system for healthcare analysts that automated compliance/operations knowledge retrieval across PDFs, reports, and databases. Emphasizes production reliability (monitoring, retries, fallbacks, async queues), strong evaluation/iteration loops, and measurable impact (3–10s responses and ~98% top-k retrieval accuracy).”

“ML/AI engineer with experience at Uber and Scale AI, focused on customer service automation across both classical NLP and generative AI systems. Has owned systems from experimentation through production on AWS, including LLM fine-tuning, RAG optimization, safety evaluation, and internal Python platform tooling that improved consistency and engineering velocity.”

“Internship experience at Intuit building an LLM-grounded QA system for internal microservice data across 100+ microservices, using a graph database approach (evaluated Neo4j and selected AWS Neptune for production alignment). Also has UC Berkeley research experience (including work with Prof. Dawn Song / Berkeley Eye Research Lab) and cross-functional collaboration with bioinformatics/biology teams to deploy software systems on research servers.”