Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“Built and launched a production self-healing MLOps agent that autonomously diagnosed and fixed model training failures on Kubernetes GPU infrastructure. Combines deep AI infrastructure knowledge with full-stack product ownership, and has delivered measurable impact including 35% less infrastructure waste, nearly 50% less troubleshooting time, and 60% lower LLM API costs.”

Joseph Villanueva

Screened

Senior Software Engineer specializing in full-stack SaaS and Healthcare IT

San Francisco, CA8y exp

“Product-minded software engineer from Gusto who has shipped internal AI agent capabilities and end-to-end user-facing features across frontend and backend. Stands out for making pragmatic architecture tradeoffs—moving from OpenAI prototypes to deterministic systems when accuracy, latency, and uptime mattered—while still improving LLM workflow quality and reducing tool-calling errors by 15%.”

“Director-level Senior Manager of Software Engineering at Discover with roughly a decade in web application engineering leadership, focused on modernizing legacy banking platforms into cloud-native SPA architectures. Stands out for combining large-team people leadership with hands-on technical depth in architecture, debugging, and prototyping, including GenAI experimentation and high-scale customer-facing migrations.”

“Full-stack engineer with hands-on experience shipping operational products in inventory and production management, spanning React/TypeScript frontends and Python, Node.js, and Java/Spring Boot backends. Particularly strong in making complex systems usable and reliable in production, including AI-powered anomaly detection with fallback logic, observability, and user-friendly alerting for non-technical operations teams.”

Mos Fard

Screened

Senior Distributed Systems Architect specializing in backend platforms and FinTech

Scottsdale, AZ12y exp

“Full-stack engineer who built an AI-powered visual product discovery feature end to end across web, mobile, backend, and ML integration. Particularly strong in TypeScript-first monorepo architecture, serverless AWS microservices, and productionizing computer vision/LLM pipelines with monitoring, prompt refinement, and human-in-the-loop quality controls.”

“Architecture leader from Disney who managed system, AI, and data architects while staying hands-on in solution design. Has experience building LLM-based video advertising products, designing Kafka-based real-time data architectures, and using MVP/POC approaches to align product and executive stakeholders.”

“Frontend engineer with strong ownership of high-scale, real-time support product experiences at Zendesk. Particularly compelling for teams building complex browser UIs: they’ve solved ordering/correctness issues in asynchronous messaging, improved agent UX with measurable behavioral signals, led a GraphQL subscription migration that tripled connection capacity, and delivered WCAG-compliant accessibility for AI-assisted features.”

“Full-stack engineer with hands-on ownership of a customer-facing advanced performance metrics experience in the Amazon S3 console, spanning React UI, Python/Node services, Redshift/RDS data access, and AWS IaC/CI-CD with CloudWatch/Route53 operational readiness. Demonstrates strong production instincts around resilience (partial failures, multi-region inconsistencies), progressive rollouts/feature flags, and reliable ETL/integration patterns (idempotency, backfills, reconciliation).”

Ranfei Pang

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in AI systems and FinTech

Boston, MA4y exp

“Amazon warehouse-tools engineer with strong full-stack and GenAI systems experience, spanning large-scale provisioning platforms and internal LLM/chatbot products. They’ve owned systems end to end, including React/TypeScript frontends, Java/AWS backend orchestration, and Bedrock-based RAG architectures, with measurable impact on latency, token cost, validation quality, and operational support load.”

“Robotics software engineer who has built end-to-end pipelines spanning backend/data processing through model interfaces and hardware integration. Has hands-on ROS2 experience building Python nodes and debugging real-time behavior via profiling, publish-rate tuning, and latency fixes, plus experience standardizing multi-robot communication with QoS adjustments. Uses Gazebo simulation and Docker/CI/CD to catch integration issues early and speed iteration.”

“Software engineer focused on reliability and scalable systems: built React/TypeScript dashboards backed by Java/Spring Boot APIs and designed Kafka-based microservices with strong contract/versioning discipline. Known for shipping incremental improvements with tight feedback loops and for creating internal observability tools that streamline on-call and incident diagnosis under high-traffic conditions.”

“Backend-focused Python engineer who built an end-to-end personalized chatbot service integrating Amazon Redshift context retrieval with Amazon Bedrock, including prompt construction and production-grade reliability controls. Strong platform experience deploying containerized services to Kubernetes with GitOps/ArgoCD, plus hands-on Kafka streaming and phased infrastructure migration execution.”

“Search/backend engineer with hands-on experience improving Apache Solr-based search systems end-to-end (indexing strategy changes, ETL updates, and Java/Spring Boot Search API work). Demonstrated production rigor with QA partnership, A/B testing, and rollback-safe kill switches, plus measurable product impact (e.g., +1.5% add-to-cart) and operational troubleshooting including traffic/security mitigation.”

“Full stack engineer in the financial/thematic investing domain who built end-to-end applications on AWS. Notably redesigned a slow portfolio analytics workflow by offloading heavy computations to scheduled AWS Lambda jobs and caching results in DynamoDB (TTL), cutting API latency from ~5 seconds to under 300ms while supporting data-heavy daily market processing.”

“Backend-heavy full-stack engineer with experience at Intuit (TurboTax Live) and Paytm payments, building and scaling Java/Spring Boot microservices for high-traffic transaction systems. Has hands-on wins improving peak-load performance using Redis/disk caching and Kafka event-driven patterns, plus React/Redux work for web app integration and strong monitoring practices with ELK.”

“Built a production-style PyTorch LSTM system that generates structured piano compositions from 1200+ MIDI files, then significantly improved long-range musical coherence by implementing Bahdanau attention based on research literature. Also has internship experience using Docker Compose for containerized backend workloads and has independently used Ray to scale ML experiments across multiple GPUs, including dealing with GPU scheduling/memory oversubscription issues.”

“Software engineer with experience at Striim and Amazon who ships end-to-end production systems across UI, backend, ML, and operations. Built a real-time PII detection capability for a streaming data platform by integrating Python ML inference into a Java monolith via gRPC sidecars, achieving ~3M events/hour throughput and ~93% accuracy, and helped drive enterprise adoption (Fiserv, CVS). Also modernized internal Amazon tooling for multi-region scale with modularization and fully automated deployments.”

“Backend/platform engineer with payroll domain depth who built high-volume payroll processing microservices (Java/Spring Boot, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Redis) on AWS Kubernetes and debugged major peak-cycle latency by redesigning transaction boundaries and moving to async Kafka processing (>50% latency reduction). Also shipped an LLM-powered HR assistant using RAG with strong security/guardrails (RBAC, PII masking, audit logs) that cut support tickets by 40%, and designed reliable multi-step agent workflows with retries, circuit breakers, and idempotency.”

“Backend/AI workflow engineer with PayPal experience building workflow-driven financial compliance systems (Python/Java, Postgres, AWS/EKS) at thousands of executions/day. Has shipped production LLM-powered document extraction with strict schema/rule validation, auditability, and human-in-the-loop fallbacks, and has deep expertise in reliability (idempotency, locking, state machines) and Postgres performance tuning.”

“Backend/ML systems engineer with Stripe payments experience who built an asynchronous processing upgrade handling millions of API requests, cutting peak latency ~20–25% while preserving strict financial consistency via idempotency-safe retries and robust validation/fallbacks. Also built scalable ETL pipelines for messy CSV/Excel/API data with strong observability (structured logging/monitoring) and reliability mechanisms.”

“Data engineer with healthcare (CVS Health) experience who migrated production PySpark workloads to native BigQuery SQL and built a Great Expectations-based validation microservice on GKE (Flask + REST) integrated into Cloud Composer. Has operated high-volume pipelines (~300–400GB/day) and designed external vendor ingestion on AWS (Lambda/Step Functions/Glue) with schema-drift detection, alerting, and backfill-safe controls to protect downstream Snowflake/BigQuery tables.”

“Built and shipped a production enterprise RAG knowledge assistant that returns grounded, cited answers and uses confidence-based fallbacks (clarifying questions/abstention) with monitoring and compliance controls for sensitive data. Implemented end-to-end agent orchestration (function calling, structured JSON, state, retries/rate limits) plus eval/feedback loops, and achieved a reported 30–40% improvement in knowledge-task completion time while reducing hallucinations via retrieval improvements.”

Lavanya Chilakalapudi

Screened

Mid-level Full-Stack Developer specializing in cloud-native web apps and APIs

Tampa, FL5y exp

“Backend engineer with experience building microservice-based systems that integrate LLM workflows (code review suggestions, documentation generation, test scaffolding) using REST APIs, Celery/Redis, and OpenTelemetry for observability. Demonstrates hands-on database and performance optimization in PostgreSQL/SQLAlchemy (bulk inserts, lock mitigation, cursor-based pagination) plus multi-tenant data isolation via tenant-aware models, middleware scoping, and schema/row-level strategies.”