Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

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.”

“Built an AI-powered job outreach application for his own job search and took it from idea to production use, owning architecture, FastAPI backend, retrieval/generation pipeline, frontend workflow, deployment, and iteration. Especially compelling for teams needing a pragmatic full-stack engineer who can turn LLM-based product ideas into usable, maintainable tools with measurable workflow impact.”

“Built end-to-end LLM/RAG systems for biological data and scientific literature analysis in a drug discovery setting, helping researchers explore disease insights and treatment hypotheses faster. Combines applied GenAI product work with strong production engineering, including monitoring, retrieval optimization, reusable Python services, and scalable deployment on AWS/Kubeflow.”

Devika gade

Screened

Mid-level Full-Stack Developer specializing in FinTech and cloud-native applications

Remote, USA4y exp

“Full stack developer with strong implementation ownership across cloud deployments, integrations, and AI-powered support automation. They have put LLM/RAG workflows into production with measurable impact—cutting first response time by nearly 40%—and show unusual depth in debugging non-deterministic AI incidents, improving observability, and turning messy document inputs into reliable API-driven pipelines.”

Shreya B

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in backend, cloud-native, and GenAI systems

Redmond, WA5y exp

“Software engineer with strong Java/Spring Boot backend depth and hands-on full-stack experience building AI-powered enterprise knowledge assistants and customer-facing order tracking systems. Stands out for combining RAG/LLM product work, event-driven microservices, and user-trust-focused product iteration, including shipping prototypes that became the basis for broader production workflows.”

“Product leader with experience at Amazon and Temenos, focused on AI-powered consumer experiences at scale. They led critical Alexa+ launches, including the first Suno music-generation integration on Alexa, combining strong UX instincts, LLM quality frameworks, and partner negotiation to unblock launches and drive major engagement gains. They also bring people leadership and a thoughtful human-in-the-loop perspective on AI, especially across multilingual and culturally nuanced markets.”

“Full-stack engineer who built and owned a production real-estate search platform (advanced search + saved-search alerts) using Next.js App Router/TypeScript with a NestJS + Postgres + Elasticsearch/Kafka backend. Demonstrated strong performance engineering (map search FPS ~20→60, ~80% latency reduction) and backend scalability (optimized alert-matching queries and orchestrated notification workflows with Airflow/Redis), with measurable post-launch engagement gains (+27% returning users).”

“Full-stack engineer with 5+ years of experience who built real-time data visualization and analytics systems at Uber, spanning React/TypeScript frontends, Node/GraphQL services, Kafka pipelines, and PostgreSQL. Particularly compelling for teams needing a hands-on builder who can turn ambiguous customer needs into scalable products, and who has also applied RAG with LangChain/OpenAI over 1.8M support files to surface actionable insights.”

Melbourne Brown

Screened

Senior Software Engineer specializing in AI-driven cloud-native platforms

Atlanta, GA12y exp

“Engineer with unusual breadth: from a tiny startup building racehorse medical-record systems on credit-card chips for live racetrack demos to modern AI-powered contract intelligence platforms in production. Brings hands-on full-stack and backend depth across React, Python, .NET, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, and Azure, with a track record of making complex, reliability-sensitive systems work in real-world conditions.”

“Robotics-focused engineer who built a non-holonomic self-driving car on Raspberry Pi 5 using ROS 2, implementing sensor fusion (robot_localization EKF), 2D SLAM (slam_toolbox), custom Hybrid A*/RRT* planners, and MPC trajectory tracking. Demonstrated strong real-time debugging and performance tuning (timestamp sync, CPU contention mitigation) and is extending the platform toward CV-based plant identification and autonomous plant watering.”

“Software engineer with experience at PayPal and JPMC building large-scale onboarding/account setup systems using React/TypeScript with Spring Boot/Node microservices and Kafka. Also built an Ignition-based SCADA monitoring tool at Mainspring Energy that became the default for manufacturing/test engineers by aggregating real-time telemetry and historical test data.”

“Backend-focused software engineer (4+ years) across e-commerce, banking, and healthcare who owned mission-critical checkout/order management end-to-end and improved peak-traffic success rates via resiliency patterns (timeouts/retries/caching) and data-driven iteration. Also built and shipped real-time operational dashboards (React/TypeScript + Spring Boot) using WebSockets and event-stream integrations, with strong experience in Kafka/RabbitMQ-style messaging at scale.”

“Backend engineer focused on cloud/distributed systems, deploying Java 17/Spring Boot microservices on AWS EKS with RDS and Kafka. Demonstrated strong production readiness work (DB lock mitigation, Kafka idempotency, gradual rollouts) and delivered a major latency improvement (~400ms to ~100ms). Also has proven cross-layer troubleshooting skills, isolating intermittent API timeouts to a specific Kubernetes node’s network interface issue, and partners closely with ops teams to build dashboards and workflow automation (including Python scripts).”

“AI/LLM engineer at Capital One who deployed a production RAG-powered fraud analysis and document intelligence platform using LangChain, OpenAI, Pinecone, Kafka, and AWS. Focused on reliability in real-time investigations via hybrid retrieval, schema-validated outputs, and LLM verification loops, reporting review-time reduction from hours to minutes and ~99% fraud detection precision.”

“Built a hackathon "Patient Summary Assistant" backend focused on healthcare workflows, combining RAG-based summarization with HIPAA-minded privacy controls (NER redaction + encryption). Demonstrated strong infra skills by deploying on Kubernetes with Helm/HPA and GitOps (ArgoCD), plus migrating from OpenAI to an on-prem Llama 3 stack (vLLM, quantization, shadow-mode testing) and adding real-time Kafka ingestion for patient vitals/anomaly alerts.”

“Built and productionized a RAG-based analytics Q&A assistant for a financial analytics team, enabling natural-language querying across 200+ datasets (SQL tables, PDFs, compliance docs, wikis) and cutting turnaround time by 60%. Deep experience delivering regulated, audit-ready LLM systems on Azure (Azure OpenAI + LangChain) with strict grounding/citations, hybrid retrieval, and AKS-based low-latency deployment, plus strong collaboration with compliance analysts and auditors via iterative Gradio demos.”

“ML/LLM engineer building production, real-time fraud detection for financial transactions using a two-tier architecture (fast ML + GPT) to deliver both low-latency decisions and analyst-friendly risk explanations. Experienced orchestrating end-to-end retraining, drift monitoring, and automated model promotion with Databricks Jobs/Workflows and MLflow, and partnering closely with fraud analysts to tune alerts, thresholds, and dashboards.”

“ML/LLM practitioner with production experience building a healthcare review sentiment pipeline (RateMDs) using Hugging Face Transformers plus a LangChain+FAISS RAG layer for interactive querying. Also led orchestration-driven optimization of Nike’s Fusion ETL pipeline, improving runtime efficiency by 20%, and has experience translating ML outputs into Tableau dashboards for non-technical healthcare stakeholders (e.g., readmission risk).”

“Software engineer with primary experience in Java and Python who also troubleshoots and optimizes JavaScript/React performance issues. Has handled customer-reported production problems via log-driven diagnosis and backend workflow fixes, and took ownership of simplifying and automating a service region-expansion process through time analysis and process documentation.”

“Engineering leader who has led 100+ engineers at Sainsbury’s Tech and previously scaled an org from 6 to 60+ at AND Digital. Drove a high-impact modernization of a pricing/decisioning platform serving 1,700 stores—moving from batch monolith to real-time Kafka-based event-driven microservices with MLOps, IaC (Terraform), and zero-trust—delivering £18m+ annual profit uplift and 10+ deploys/day.”

“Worked on payments and wallet transactions, with an emphasis on observability and root-cause analysis. Delivered end-to-end A/B testing optimization and implemented Jenkins-based CI/CD automation that reduced manual implementation to 35% and cut deployments to ~2 minutes, with attention to operational considerations like on-call/call rotations.”

“Senior data engineer with experience in both healthcare (CVS Health) and financial services (Bank of America), building large-scale Azure lakehouse pipelines (30+ EHR sources, ~5TB) and real-time streaming services (Event Hubs/Kafka) for patient vitals. Strong focus on reliability and data quality (Great Expectations, monitoring/alerting, schema drift automation), with measurable outcomes like 50% runtime reduction and 99%+ uptime for regulatory reporting pipelines.”