Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“Commercial UNIX specialist and former tech lead for a UNIX-based telco appliance spanning 11 SPARC Solaris servers, with strong Solaris troubleshooting (truss/iostat/netstat/snoop) and extensive shell scripting automation for safer, more consistent operations. Has executed multiple Solaris major-version migrations (6→8→10→11) and brings broad cross-UNIX platform experience (Solaris/SunOS/HP-UX/IRIX/OSF/1), while actively looking to deepen hands-on AIX/IBM Power expertise.”

“Co-founded a Digital Loss Prevention (DLP) startup and raised $6M in seed funding by showcasing a controlled, laptop-based technology demo. Post-funding, drove MVP planning and execution by sequencing operations and assembling a team to build an appliance MVP, using an iterative build/evaluate/visualize approach.”

“Amazon Fire TV Devices engineer who built and shipped a production LLM-powered lab triage and validation system that grounds recommendations in internal runbooks/known-issue data and pushes evidence-based actions via dashboards and Slack. Emphasizes safety and measurability with structured JSON outputs, replay-based evaluation on historical incidents, and production metrics (e.g., disagreement rate and time-to-first-action), plus cost/latency optimizations like caching, batching, and rule-based fast paths.”

“Built and shipped a production-grade GenAI Fraud & Compliance Investigation Copilot for a large US bank, integrating OCR docs, structured data, and prior case history to generate grounded, regulator-friendly summaries and red-flag highlights. Demonstrates strong end-to-end LLM systems engineering (LangGraph/LangChain, hybrid retrieval with FAISS+BM25, guardrails/citations, streaming/latency optimization) plus rigorous evaluation and close partnership with compliance stakeholders.”

“Robotics software engineer focused on production-grade autonomy in GPS-denied environments, building full navigation stacks (perception, EKF/UKF sensor fusion, planning, control) in ROS2. Integrated YOLOv8/semantic segmentation/RL policies into real-time NAV2 pipelines via a custom perception-aware costmap layer, with emphasis on deterministic control loops, embedded GPU performance, and robust system observability/fault tolerance.”

“Engineering leader who drove TiVo IPTV’s client-facing API modernization from a monolith to AWS-based microservices (API Gateway, Lambda, EKS, Kafka, DynamoDB/RDS), including phased/blue-green production routing of millions of calls. Emphasizes org scaling through skill-based hiring, mentorship, and a you-build-you-run ownership culture, while balancing technical leadership with executive stakeholder communication and budgeting.”

“Backend engineer who built a Python-based data profiling/statistics platform processing up to 50M rows and ~300 metrics, using a DAG execution model, multithreading, and smart caching to cut processing time by up to 70%. Also improved PostgreSQL query performance from 12s to 2s via indexing/query rewrites, integrated an LLM (LangChain + OpenAI) for explainable “chat with the pipeline” functionality, and designed an AWS EC2+SQS architecture for scalable, isolated per-user processing.”

“Software engineer with experience at Google and the City and County of San Francisco building production AI systems, including a RAG-based internal support chatbot and ML-driven ticket priority tagging. Has scaled data/ML platforms with Airflow on GCP (1M+ records/day, 99.9% SLA) and deployed multi-component systems with Docker and Kubernetes (GKE), using modern LLM tooling (LangChain/CrewAI, Claude/OpenAI, Pinecone/ChromaDB, Bedrock/Ollama).”

“LLM-focused customer-facing engineer who repeatedly takes document Q&A and agentic prototypes into secure, monitored production systems. Experienced in reducing hallucinations via RAG + guardrails, diagnosing retrieval/embedding issues in real time, and partnering with sales to run metrics-driven PoCs that overcome accuracy/security objections and drive adoption.”

“Backend/AI engineer who built and scaled an internal AMD semiconductor manufacturing microservice platform (SMR), reworking a synchronous lot-request workflow into an event-driven RabbitMQ/Celery/FastAPI pipeline. Diagnosed and fixed peak-load reliability issues using deep observability and Kubernetes autoscaling, cutting notification latency back to sub-second and reducing duplicates via idempotency/DLQs. Also shipped an LLM-powered natural-language search with schema-constrained JSON outputs and guardrails, plus a plan-execute-verify Jira bug-resolution agent that can propose fixes and raise PRs under restricted permissions.”

“Owned and built Bloomberg’s end-to-end bitemporal dividend & dividend-forecast data platform powering BQL for 400k+ terminal users. Architected real-time Kafka ingestion (5k–10k msgs/sec) across 100k+ tickers with strong correctness guarantees (PIT/bitemporal time-travel, immutable history to avoid look-ahead bias) and achieved sub-100ms p95 query latency through indexing and caching, deployed with Kubernetes + DLQ and robust monitoring.”

“Data engineer with experience at Moderna and Block owning high-volume (≈10TB/day) production pipelines on AWS, using Kafka/S3/Glue/dbt/Snowflake with strong data quality and observability practices (schema validation, anomaly detection, CloudWatch monitoring). Also built external financial API ingestion with Airflow retries, throttling/token rotation, and schema versioning, and helped stand up an early-stage biomedical data platform with CI/CD and incident debugging.”

“Data engineer with eBay experience owning end-to-end pipelines for real-time order and user behavior analytics at 10M+ records/day. Strong in PySpark/SQL transformations, Airflow reliability patterns, and production observability (CloudWatch), with measurable outcomes including improved data quality and 30–40% query performance gains. Also built Python data APIs for analytics/ML consumers with versioning and backward compatibility.”

Travoy Spelling

Screened

Senior Data Scientist / ML Engineer specializing in GenAI, LLMs, and NLP

Texarkana, TX10y exp

“ML/NLP engineer focused on production GenAI and data linking systems: built a large-scale RAG pipeline over millions of support docs using LangChain/Pinecone and added a LangGraph-based validation layer to cut hallucinations ~40%. Also built scalable PySpark entity resolution (95%+ accuracy) and fine-tuned Sentence-BERT embeddings with contrastive learning for ~30% relevance lift, with strong CI/CD and observability practices (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana).”

Sudhir Nelvagal

Screened

Executive Product & Engineering Leader specializing in Cloud/SaaS, AI/ML, and Cybersecurity

Cary, NC30y exp

“Engineering/technology leader with experience at GE, Owl Cyber Defense, and Team Cymru, focused on translating VOC and business strategy into iterative product/technology roadmaps. Led delivery of a Continuous Threat Exposure Management/asset discovery capability integrated with threat intel, reaching GA in ~2 quarters and generating ~$300K in pre-GA orders. Has scaled engineering organizations significantly (to ~100 FTE) and driven big-data security architectures using Kafka and ClickHouse with data-driven cost/performance tradeoffs.”

Byron Pineda

Screened

Staff/Lead Data Scientist specializing in Generative AI, NLP/LLMs, and MLOps

Pascagoula, MS10y exp

“Lead Data Scientist (10+ years) with recent work in healthcare data: built production pipelines that unify EHR, genomics, and clinical notes using NLP (spaCy/BERT/BioBERT) and scalable Spark-based processing. Also led development of domain-specific LLM/NLP systems for chatbots and semantic search, deploying models via FastAPI/Flask and improving retrieval with FAISS-backed, fine-tuned clinical embeddings and RAG-style workflows.”

Akanksha Agrawal

Screened

Mid-Level Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in event-driven data platforms

Bangalore, India5y exp

“Backend engineer with SAP experience modernizing a legacy Flask/PostgreSQL product master data platform into a modular, stateless, containerized service with Kafka-based background processing and improved observability. Also has hands-on academic/side-project experience operationalizing ML (NLP retrieval with TF-IDF/BERT via FastAPI and CV lane-edge detection inference APIs using PyTorch).”

Sarath Dunga

Screened

Mid-level Full-Stack Developer specializing in cloud microservices and AI/ML integration

Remote, USA4y exp

“Full-stack engineer (~3 years) with eBay production experience building and operating high-scale, event-driven Python microservices for order processing and AI-powered recommendations (Kafka/Redis/FastAPI on AWS with Prometheus/Grafana). Also delivered polished React+TypeScript analytics dashboards and designed high-concurrency PostgreSQL schemas with significant latency reductions. Recently built AI-agent orchestration and an interactive node-based requirements dashboard for Siemens Polarion via MCP servers, improving user interaction by ~17.8%+.”

Rishitha Madipelli

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in cloud-native distributed systems and streaming data

Austin, TX7y exp

“Backend/product engineer with Tesla experience building and operating a real-time OTA update monitoring and fleet analytics platform at massive scale (telemetry from 3M+ vehicles). Delivered end-to-end systems across Kafka-based ingestion, TimescaleDB/Postgres analytics modeling, FastAPI/GraphQL APIs, and React/TypeScript dashboards, and handled production scaling incidents on AWS EKS during major rollout spikes.”

Anu Baluguri

Screened

Mid-Level Software Engineer specializing in cloud-native microservices and event-driven systems

San Francisco, CA4y exp

“Full-stack engineer with production experience at Atlassian and Zoho, spanning GraphQL federation, React/TypeScript frontends, and cloud-native AWS/Kubernetes operations. Built and operated a federated GraphQL gateway with Terraform + CI/CD + observability, delivering major latency and integration-time improvements, and also designed high-volume Kafka data pipelines (10M+ events/day) with strong reliability guarantees.”

Saiteja Gaddam

Screened

Mid-Level Data Engineer specializing in cloud data platforms and streaming analytics

3y exp

“Data engineer (Intuit) who owned an end-to-end telemetry and subscription analytics platform processing ~22M events/day, built on Kinesis/S3/Glue/Spark/Airflow/Redshift. Strong focus on reliability and data quality (schema drift controls, quarantine layers, idempotent reruns) and performance tuning, achieving a reporting latency reduction from ~15 minutes to under 4 minutes while enabling revenue and churn analytics for business teams.”

Ranganayak Meravath

Screened

Mid-level Generative AI Engineer specializing in RAG, agentic copilots, and regulated AI

5y exp

“Senior engineer who built and productionized an Azure-based Enterprise AI Copilot for financial/compliance teams, focused on grounded, auditable answers with citations to reduce hallucinations in regulated workflows. Experienced designing multi-step agent orchestration and improving reliability through targeted iterations (e.g., fixing chunking/parsing to materially improve citation accuracy), plus building defensive pipelines for messy ERP/operational finance data.”

“Full-stack engineer with experience spanning Amazon IMDb and Northeastern’s NeuroJSON portal, combining consumer product work with complex scientific data applications. Built IMDb’s streaming providers feature—described as the company’s most impactful feature of 2023—and has hands-on experience with React/Angular, GraphQL, AWS, Python services, and production monitoring.”