Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“ML/backend engineer with PayPal experience building high-stakes production systems, including a GenAI internal support assistant and a real-time fraud scoring pipeline. Strong in Python/FastAPI, model-serving infrastructure, RAG architecture, and production observability, with clear readiness to transition those backend patterns into a TypeScript stack.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Data engineer with experience at Bloomberg, UBS, and Bank of America building high-volume financial data platforms and services. Owned an end-to-end pipeline processing ~150–200M records/day (Kafka/Cassandra/S3 → Spark/PySpark → Snowflake) with strong data quality controls and Airflow reliability practices, reporting ~99% reliability and major performance gains. Also built large-scale external API ingestion with compliance-minded rate limiting, schema versioning, and quarantine/validation layers.”

“Platform/infra engineer with strong ownership of Kubernetes on VMware and day-to-day hybrid on-prem-to-AWS operations. Has hands-on experience automating infrastructure delivery with Terraform/Ansible/CI-CD, and has resolved real production issues spanning CSI storage reattachment during upgrades, vSphere storage-latency performance degradation, and hybrid connectivity/routing failures with improved validation, monitoring, and failover.”

Vignesh Shanmugasundaram

Screened

Junior Software Engineer specializing in full-stack development and applied ML

New York, NY2y exp

“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.”

Poorna Pedapudi

Screened

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

Seattle, WA5y exp

“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.”

“Built and productionized a multi-agent LLM analytics assistant at eBay that routes natural-language questions to retrieval or text-to-SQL, dynamically retrieves relevant schemas via a vector DB, and executes against a data warehouse. Drove a major quality lift (text-to-SQL accuracy 60%→85%) and materially reduced time engineers/PMs spent getting data insights through strong eval/monitoring, tracing, and reliability-focused design (schema retrieval, strict JSON outputs, retries/clarifications).”

“Backend/AI systems engineer who has shipped production LLM agents focused on prompt engineering, code generation, and incident-response automation. Stands out for combining strong agent orchestration and reliability engineering with measurable business impact, including 60-70% cost reductions, 45% lower monthly LLM spend, and a 5x increase in developer iteration speed.”

“Built a production GenAI support agent at Amazon for FBA on-call operations, using Bedrock, Lambda, RAG, and confidence-based human fallback to safely automate ticket triage. The system materially reduced ticket volume and manual workload while improving MTTR, showing strong depth in reliable LLM agent architecture under real operational constraints.”

“Engineer who uses AI in a disciplined, practical way—leveraging it to speed debugging, generate edge-case tests, and improve coverage while retaining ownership of system design and production validation. Has experimented with chained AI tools but prefers simpler workflows when they reduce noise and review overhead.”

Varshitha Macherla

Screened

Junior Full-Stack Developer specializing in Java microservices and cloud platforms

Overland Park, KS2y exp

“Full-stack engineer (~2.6 years) with strong Java/Spring Boot backend experience and React/Angular frontend exposure, who has worked on enterprise-scale systems at Dell processing ~1.8M daily transactions/events. Built secure, partner/internal-facing APIs (OAuth2/JWT) across 14 integrations and implemented Kafka-based order/payment workflows with idempotency and sub-700ms processing targets, plus CI/CD and Selenium-based release validation.”

“Senior engineering leader in healthcare AI who combines org scaling with deep hands-on architecture work. At DriveHealth.ai, they helped evolve isolated workflows into a production-grade intelligent platform, standardizing a shared RAG+DCE architecture while leading teams of 50+ across engineering, AI, platform, QA, and DevOps.”