Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“Staff-level engineer with a track record of building greenfield, high-impact platforms inside major enterprises like Apple TV, CAA, and Disney. Particularly compelling for teams that need startup-style ownership with enterprise-grade execution: they’ve driven cross-department adoption, built AI and real-time systems hands-on, and delivered measurable operational gains in media, content, and ERP environments.”

“Senior full-stack engineer with seed-stage fintech experience who has led payment API development, implemented compliance-related standards, and built production systems across React, Go, Python, Node.js, and PostgreSQL. Notable impact includes enabling a first major client launch, reducing logistics response times by 30%, improving page load times by 40%+, and cutting analytics report generation from minutes to seconds.”

“Data engineer/backend developer with experience owning end-to-end, high-volume data pipelines for ML/analytics using Python, Airflow, SQL, and PySpark, reporting ~30% error reduction through improved reliability and data quality checks. Has also built Django-based REST APIs with caching/pagination and strong versioning practices, and operated external data collection/web scraping pipelines with anti-bot measures, monitoring, retries, and idempotent backfills.”

“Full-stack engineer with strong AI systems and B2B SaaS experience across BrightOps, Zapier, Nordstrom, and Calendly. They’ve owned architecture for an AI-powered tutoring platform, improved retrieval quality with a hybrid vector-plus-keyword approach, and built Go services processing over 1 million student events per day. Particularly compelling for teams building data-intensive, reliability-critical products with LLM, workflow automation, or compliance-oriented use cases.”

“Built and shipped customer-facing AI systems in banking, including an AI fraud support workflow and virtual assistant at Citi/Citibank that handled over 1 million conversations per month. Combines full-stack engineering, LLM/RAG architecture, and strong compliance-minded design with PII masking, audit logging, confidence thresholds, and human escalation for regulated environments.”

“Backend/data engineer with production experience building credit/fraud enrichment services and checkout pipelines on AWS (EKS + Lambda) using FastAPI, Kafka, Postgres, and Redis, with a strong focus on reliability patterns (timeouts/retries/circuit breakers) and observability. Has also built AWS Glue/PySpark ETL into S3/Redshift with schema evolution and data quality controls, and modernized legacy credit decisioning into Java/Node microservices with parallel-run parity validation and feature-flag rollouts.”

“Built and deployed a production AI/ML SRE copilot that uses RAG over real-time Splunk signals plus deployment/runbook data to generate grounded incident summaries and next steps, cutting time-to-contact by 30%. Treats the knowledge corpus like a production dataset (quality gates, semantic chunking, metadata enrichment) and runs golden-dataset automated evals to ensure reliability, while partnering closely with ops/support leaders through discovery sessions and metric-driven demos.”

“Engineering leader who managed a 20-person cross-functional team building customer-driven software solutions, delivering a 50% reduction in simulation/test lifecycle and securing a long-term strategic SLA. Strong in scalable data ingestion architectures (FastAPI + Kafka + multiprocess workers), operational diagnostics (correlation IDs/centralized logging), and microservice decoupling for analytics/visualization. Active open-source contributor who shipped a NATS bug fix and improved SDK onboarding with automation that cut ramp time by 30%.”

“Technology leader with experience owning enterprise roadmaps and executing large-scale platform standardization during rapid M&A—most notably driving a tech roadmap across a 37-company portfolio at Regent, tackling technical debt and security gaps via unified cloud-native architecture, IAM/logging, CI/CD, and a global SRE model. Previously scaled an Adobe engineering org from 8 to 40+ across four regions, implementing clear org design, KPIs, and an extreme-ownership culture to support 24/7 operations and enterprise needs.”

“Backend-focused engineer with hands-on experience modernizing a legacy SNMP/PNM data collection system at CableLabs into a cloud-accessible Kubernetes pipeline, feeding Prometheus-formatted metrics into VictoriaMetrics and visualizing real-time network health in Grafana for 100+ modems. Also built a FastAPI + Supabase appointment booking portal for a clinic with encryption and phone-number-based auth, and has frontend experience debugging S3-based HEIF image rendering issues.”

“Built and shipped production improvements to a Paylocity RAG-based AI assistant, redesigning retrieval into a hybrid HNSW + keyword pipeline and using tuned RRF to fuse rankings—cutting latency by ~2s and reducing token usage by ~5000. Previously spearheaded Apache Airflow integration across ETL pipelines at Acuity Knowledge Partners, creating reusable templates and automated triggers to reduce manual job monitoring.”

“Entrepreneur building a bootstrapped AI-based personal agent (inspired by Claude desktop) aimed at making AI assistance accessible to non-technical users. Motivated by improving individuals' daily lives by helping them organize their day and offload simple, repeatable tasks; plans to explore VC/accelerator options but has not raised capital yet.”

Chetan Mukhopadhyay

Screened

Senior Engineering Manager specializing in software quality, automation, and web/mobile platforms

Seattle, WA16y exp

“Engineering leader at Bayer Crop Science leading a Core Platform team responsible for widely used open-source TypeScript/React and mobile SDKs (npm/GitHub) embedded across 10M+ monthly active devices. Known for shipping high-performance, backward-compatible developer frameworks with rigorous release discipline (bi-weekly releases, 99.99% uptime, long streaks of zero breaking changes) and major DX wins (onboarding cut to minutes, support tickets down 82%).”

Neha Baadadmath

Screened

Executive Software Engineering Leader specializing in Trading, Payments, and FinTech platforms

Phoenix, AZ18y exp

“Entrepreneurially minded operator with experience in trading-platform environments who prototyped a vector-database layer to generate contextual incident narratives and reduce MTTR/escalations. Also building a non-tech venture: luxury wine distribution into India and broader Asian markets, sourcing directly from wineries with a Master of Wine and planning tier-1 launch via restaurant-owner connections while navigating complex import duties and licensing.”

Vindhya Naidu

Screened

Mid-level Backend Software Engineer specializing in Java/Spring microservices and FinTech

Austin, TX5y exp

“Backend engineer with Apple experience who owned production platform improvements end-to-end, including a Redis caching layer that cut API latency ~35–40% and reduced DB load. Has hands-on on-call/incident response and observability (CloudWatch), plus experience scaling Docker/Kubernetes microservices and operating Kafka-based telemetry pipelines with schema evolution, deduplication, and replay/backfill handling.”

“Primary engineer at Customer Insights AI who built an end-to-end Python pipeline for 340B drug pricing compliance, using ML to detect suspicious pharmaceutical claims and benefit diversion. Stands out for combining healthcare compliance domain knowledge with production reliability practices, and for turning ambiguous analyst-driven review processes into automated workflows that cut manual review by 70%.”

“Candidate is motivated by solving novel problems and brings an innovation mindset from their current work, where they introduced new practices and implemented an automated database change migration process that reduced errors and improved efficiency. They evaluate new ideas rigorously through user research, product discovery, market analysis, and competitive differentiation.”

Jiajun Huo

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in AI, data infrastructure, and LLM systems

Urbana, IL4y exp

“Built end-to-end data and automation systems at Sonic SVM, spanning Python/FastAPI/Kafka/Spark ingestion pipelines, warehouse analytics, and Playwright automation for brittle SSO-protected dashboards. Stands out for combining backend/data engineering with strong observability and reliability practices, plus a pragmatic ability to turn messy manual business processes into measurable self-serve workflows.”

Christopher Kirby

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in platform engineering, AI systems, and SaaS

Detroit, MI24y exp

“Senior engineering executive who has repeatedly rebuilt and scaled product engineering organizations in high-growth environments, including restarting Rocket Auto’s stack from scratch and hiring 100+ engineers during StockX’s hypergrowth phase. Particularly differentiated by being unusually hands-on for an executive leader, with active open source work and a strong focus on AI-native engineering workflows, developer automation, and modern architecture transformation.”

Jahnavi Rao

Screened

Mid-level Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in FinTech

USA5y exp

“Frontend-leaning full-stack engineer with Bank of America experience building production internal payment operations dashboards and modernizing legacy service integrations. Stands out for owning both design and implementation, from React/TypeScript UI architecture to Spring Boot APIs, with strong attention to performance, reliability, and production observability in complex financial systems.”