Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“Backend/data platform engineer who recently owned an end-to-end large-scale financial data platform delivering real-time decision support for finance and operations. Has hands-on experience modernizing legacy batch pipelines into AWS cloud-native ELT with parallel-run cutovers, strong data quality controls (dbt-style tests, reconciliation), and measurable improvements in runtime, cost, and SLA compliance. Also builds scalable, secure FastAPI microservices using Docker, ALB-based horizontal scaling, Redis caching, and managed auth with Cognito/Supabase plus Postgres RLS.”

“Backend/platform engineer who built a high-scale audience segmentation and real-time targeting system using Spark/Glue + S3/Hudi and low-latency API services backed by Redis/relational stores. Demonstrates strong production rigor: Spark performance tuning to eliminate OOM failures, API idempotency/caching to cut p95 latency ~40%, and careful dual-run/feature-flag migrations with reconciliation and rollback runbooks. Experienced implementing layered security with JWT/OAuth, RBAC/ABAC, and database row-level security to prevent privilege escalation.”

“AI/ML engineer who built a production agentic system to automate computational research experiments (simulation execution, parameter exploration, and numerical analysis) and mitigated context-window failures using constrained tool-calling/prompt-chaining patterns in LangChain with OpenAI tool-enabled models. Also has adtech/big-data pipeline experience at InMobi, orchestrating Spark jobs in Airflow to filter bot-like user IDs and publish clean IDs to an online NoSQL store for live serving, plus Apache open-source collaboration experience.”

“Built and deployed a production LLM/RAG clinical decision support system that enables real-time semantic search over unstructured EHR notes and delivers patient risk insights. Strong in healthcare-grade MLOps and compliance (HIPAA, PHI handling, encryption, RBAC, audit logs) and scaled embedding/retrieval pipelines using Spark/Databricks and Airflow. Partnered with clinicians via Power BI dashboards and explainability, contributing to an 18% reduction in patient readmissions.”

“Backend engineer with hands-on experience building a fraud-transaction monitoring system in Python/Flask, architected as Dockerized microservices and integrated with Kafka for high-volume streaming. Demonstrates strong performance and reliability chops across PostgreSQL/SQLAlchemy tuning (EXPLAIN ANALYZE, N+1 fixes, bulk ops), multi-tenant data isolation, and scaling via background workers + Redis caching, plus real-time ML inference deployment using TensorFlow on AWS.”

“Built an AI journaling app at HackCU 2025 featuring a speaking AI avatar with long-term memory via RAG (ChromaDB) and low-latency microservices coordinated through Kafka, including deployment under AMD/non-CUDA constraints using a quantized Llama 8B model. Also has Goldman Sachs experience deploying a Trade UI on Kubernetes with CI/CD rollback automation, plus a healthcare AI internship at CU Anschutz collaborating closely with physicians on diagnostic reasoning and dataset annotation.”

“Capital One engineer focused on fraud and payments platforms, owning end-to-end services and internal tools used by fraud analysts. Built high-traffic Kafka/REST systems and real-time React/TypeScript dashboards (WebSockets, Redis), with strong emphasis on observability, idempotency, and scalable microservices. Successfully drove adoption of AI-assisted fraud classification by pairing transparency and manual overrides with measurable workflow improvements.”

“Built and deployed an enterprise GenAI knowledge assistant over thousands of internal PDFs/reports using a RAG stack (GPT-4 + Hugging Face embeddings + vector DB) to reduce manual search and SME escalations. Uses LangGraph/LangChain to orchestrate modular agent workflows with relevance filtering and fallback handling, and applies rigorous evaluation (golden datasets, edge cases, A/B tests) with production monitoring metrics.”

“AI/LLM engineer with production experience at Charles Schwab building a RAG-based assistant to help 5,000+ reps answer complex financial policy questions. Implemented a multi-layer anti-hallucination approach (GNN-driven ontology/graph retrieval + citation-only answers) and compliance-focused guardrails (Azure AI Content Safety) in partnership with audit/compliance stakeholders.”

“Software engineer at Capital One who owned and shipped AI-driven personalization and internal insights dashboards end-to-end, emphasizing fast iteration with feature flags and tight user feedback loops. Built a TypeScript/React + Spring Boot/Python document automation platform with compute-heavy NLP microservices, async workflows, and production-scale reliability/performance practices (Kafka/RabbitMQ-style queues, Redis caching, tracing).”

“Interned at Zonda where he built an AI-driven semantic search solution over ~280M housing/builder records. Iterated from local LLMs via llama.cpp quantization to a vector-embedding retrieval system, then boosted semantic accuracy with a custom spaCy NER layer and re-ranking, optimizing for latency through precomputation. Collaborated with economics-focused stakeholders to reduce manual document/paperwork time by enabling natural-language search over internal data.”

“Engineer with banking and industrial/IoT experience who has deployed a payment-processing microservice with zero downtime, handling Protobuf schema evolution and sensitive data migration via dual-write/checksum techniques. Demonstrates strong cross-stack troubleshooting (pinpointed intermittent distributed timeouts to a failing ToR switch port) and customer-facing Python ETL customization using plugin-based parsers and Pydantic validation, plus hands-on monitoring/alerting improvements with operators.”

“Built and deployed a production LLM-powered internal documentation assistant using embeddings, a vector database, and a RAG pipeline to reduce time spent searching PDFs/manuals. Experienced in orchestrating end-to-end LLM workflows with Airflow/LangChain, improving reliability via monitoring/error handling, and driving measurable quality through retrieval and hallucination-focused evaluation metrics.”

“Built and productionized an LLM-powered PDF document Q&A system to eliminate manual searching through long documents, focusing on scalability and answer reliability. Implemented semantic chunking (using headings/paragraphs/tables), overlap, and preprocessing/quality checks to reduce hallucinations, and orchestrated the end-to-end pipeline with Airflow using retries, alerts, and parallel tasks.”

“Software developer with healthcare operations experience at Epic Systems (Referrals & Authorizations), delivering customer-facing tooling to speed manual insurance authorization/denial documentation and support future automation. Also supported an HRIS migration to Workday at Aloe Yoga, solving legacy ID interoperability via scripting and mapping, and demonstrates strong production debugging and test-driven maintainability practices.”

“Backend engineer at Goldman Sachs who built LLM-powered reconciliation/reporting services and high-throughput Kafka pipelines (8M+ events/day). Strong in production-grade Python/FastAPI microservices on Kubernetes with GitOps-style CI/CD, plus experience migrating legacy reporting/settlement services onto an internal Kubernetes platform using shadow deployments and gradual cutovers.”

“Full-stack engineer with 3+ years using Java/Spring Boot (Citi) and React, who built a production observability dashboard monitoring 53 microservices across 17 clusters with real-time health/latency tracing and significant performance improvements (cut load time from ~10s). Also designed a serverless AWS face-recognition system (Lambda/S3/SQS) built to handle burst traffic (~1000 concurrent requests), demonstrating strength in scalable, event-driven architectures.”

“Engineering leader/CTO-type with deep experience building and scaling a vehicle routing platform at Transdev On Demand, including a nationwide rollout to 22 US airports ahead of schedule. Drove engineering best practices (CI/CD, high test coverage, pair programming, automated deployments) and led a multi-tenant architectural upgrade to expand the routing engine to additional business lines and external customers.”

“Researcher from the University of South Dakota who built a production medical RAG system to help interpret model predictions by retrieving relevant clinical notes and medical literature, overcoming retrieval accuracy and imaging-dataset challenges through semantic chunking and metadata-driven indexing. Also has hands-on orchestration experience with Airflow and Azure Data Factory, plus a pragmatic approach to LLM evaluation and stakeholder-driven iteration.”

“Applied ML to physical EV fleet systems at ST Labs, building a real-time CNN-LSTM fault prediction pipeline from streaming vehicle telemetry and addressing live data alignment issues via resampling/interpolation and buffered inference. Also developed a V2G/G2V energy transfer algorithm to automate charging/discharging for profit optimization, and made high-impact low-latency pipeline decisions at Astera Holdings using profiling, replay testing, and live A/B validation.”

“Healthcare/clinical ML practitioner who built and productionized ClinicalBERT-based pipelines to extract and standardize oncology EHR data, improving downstream model F1 from 0.81 to 0.92 while controlling training cost via LoRA/QLoRA. Experienced orchestrating real-time AWS ETL/ML workflows (Glue, Lambda, SageMaker) and partnering with clinicians using SHAP-based interpretability, contributing to an 18% reduction in readmissions and full adoption.”

“Backend engineer who built and owned an AI-powered SMS survey platform for a nonprofit serving at-risk communities (internet-limited users), using Cloudflare Workers + Twilio and a state-machine survey engine. Scaled it to ~10k active users with near-zero downtime, added English/Spanish support, and iteratively improved LLM behavior (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) to handle nuanced, real-world SMS responses reliably.”

“Engineering leader/player-coach who helped ship a web-based ERP SaaS release (Nov 2025) as part of a long-term migration from a legacy desktop ERP, designing a multi-API architecture (Oracle + EF Core, caching, integrations) and enforcing rigorous code review quality gates. Previously led development of a low-latency, multi-service high-frequency trading platform at a startup hedge fund (Capitalogix Trading), leveraging async/multithreading, event-driven messaging, NoSQL, and WebSockets.”

“ML/AI engineer with production experience across retail and healthcare: built a real-time computer-vision shelf monitoring system at Walmart and optimized edge inference latency by ~30% using TensorRT/ONNX and pruning. Also partnered with CVS Health clinical/pharmacy teams to deliver a medication-adherence predictive model, using Streamlit explainability dashboards and achieving an 18% adherence improvement.”