Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

Velusamy Ramasamy

Screened

Principal Software Architect specializing in cloud platforms, data engineering, and enterprise security

Seattle, WA29y exp

“Engineering leader with experience defining solutions from business requirements through detailed specifications and implementation, emphasizing cost-aware technology selection. Has led architectural changes including adding IBM Cloud alongside AWS for budget reasons and integrating caching/messaging to improve availability and performance, and describes scaling distributed teams via experienced DevOps/QA hires and structured evaluation.”

Shriya Bannikop

Screened

Mid-level Software Engineer specializing in cloud platforms, data engineering, and distributed systems

Seattle, WA5y exp

“Full-stack engineer who built and owned an AI-assisted job-matching dashboard in Next.js App Router/TypeScript, keeping LLM logic server-side and improving performance via deduplication, caching/revalidation, and streaming (35% fewer duplicate LLM calls; 40% faster first render). Also has strong data/backend chops: designed Postgres models and optimized queries at million-record scale (1.8s to 120ms) and built durable AWS multi-region telemetry workflows with idempotency, retries, and monitoring.”

Bhanu Chander

Screened

Senior Data Engineer specializing in cloud data platforms and real-time pipelines

New York, NY6y exp

“Data engineer focused on reliability and observability, building end-to-end pipelines processing millions of records/day from sources like S3 and Kafka. Has hands-on experience with Airflow-based data quality automation, PySpark/Databricks transformations, and shipping versioned Python REST APIs deployed via Docker/Kubernetes with CI/CD (Jenkins) and monitoring (CloudWatch/Azure Logs).”

Blake Thomas

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in AI and EdTech platforms

San Mateo, CA21y exp

“Has been on the receiving end of a VC investment and took responsibility for significant parts of the diligence process, drawing parallels to hands-on work with security compliance and auditors. Approaches entrepreneurship and idea selection with a structured framework (leverage, resources/runway, passion) and a sustainability-first mindset around risk and personal/family well-being.”

Jignesh Desai

Screened

Director of Software Engineering specializing in fraud detection and payments platforms

San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA26y exp

“Engineering manager/player-coach who focuses on laying technical foundations and improving team execution: kickstarted Visa standard UI library adoption, standardized API exception handling, and introduced a test automation framework that enabled a shift from quarterly to monthly releases. Led a phased latency/throughput initiative that doubled throughput, and owned a production incident caused by a dependency’s expired certificate, driving monitoring and certificate-expiry notification improvements across dependent systems.”

“Built and shipped production LLM agents that automate document processing and decision workflows, with a strong focus on reliability, guardrails, and measurable business impact. Stands out for combining RAG, tool calling, evals/monitoring, and ERP integration to deliver 30-35% manual effort reduction and higher throughput without additional headcount.”

“Engineering leader who has operated effectively in both a VC-backed startup and SAP, combining director-level org leadership with day-to-day technical depth. Notable for re-architecting integrations that produced a 3x revenue gain, leading a 90-engineer matrixed organization, and staying hands-on in GenAI, infrastructure, and full-stack problem solving.”

Krishna Guda

Screened

Principal Software Engineer specializing in AI-native FinTech systems

Mountain View, CA23y exp

“Fintech product engineer working on a large-scale credit monitoring platform (tens of millions of users) with deep experience in regulated banking integrations, PII security, and step-up/MFA flows. Has shipped customer-facing React/TypeScript experiences driven by Optimizely experimentation and built reliable partner-facing microservices/SDKs on AWS, including resolving production traffic loss caused by edge security (DataDome/CAPTCHA) conflicts with payment providers.”

“Full-stack engineer from early-stage startups who has owned AI products end to end, from B2B document intelligence platforms on AWS to an HVAC voice assistant and a GCP-based RAG research system. Stands out for combining hands-on backend/infra depth with team leadership in lean environments, and for shipping scalable AI systems that contributed to roughly 1 million yuan in sponsorship.”

“Healthcare IT engineer with deep observability, backend, and database expertise who built mission-critical monitoring solutions across major enterprise transitions including Siemens, Cerner, and Oracle. Stood out by creating a DoD-deployed observability platform for 10,000+ HL7 interfaces and by automating hospital financial day-end workflows, cutting issues by 90% and freeing up 14 FTEs.”

“Software engineer intern at Nutanix who independently shipped and maintained an internal smoke-test/failure-analysis dashboard, integrating failure data from multiple upstream systems (e.g., Jira, Jenkins, CircleCI) via REST APIs. Also has prior data-science experience building Postgres-based asset management analytics with automated reporting and indexing for faster time-series retrieval.”

“Amazon engineer who owned customer-facing Alexa features and built automation-heavy delivery practices (API/service-level testing in CI/CD) to ship quickly without sacrificing stability. Also built an internal self-service feature management/beta access platform (Angular + Spring Boot + event publishing) that replaced a multi-team ticket workflow with instant, auditable operations, and has deep microservices/Kafka experience with strong observability and reliability patterns.”

“Java full-stack developer who has owned data-intensive, customer-facing and internal web products end-to-end (React/Angular + Spring Boot), including CI/CD and production support. Demonstrates deep microservices experience with RabbitMQ/event-driven architecture, idempotency, DLQs, and compensating logic to maintain reliability and data consistency at scale, plus a track record of replacing spreadsheet-based ops reporting with an adopted real-time internal tool.”

“Built and deployed a production LLM/RAG fraud investigation system to replace manual investigator workflows, combining transaction data, historical cases, and policy documents with agent-style steps and LoRA fine-tuning. Demonstrates strong reliability engineering (grounding, citations, abstention paths), performance optimization (retrieval/indexing/caching), and end-to-end MLOps orchestration using Azure ML Pipelines/MLflow plus Kubernetes/Argo with canary and rollback deployments.”

“Backend/platform engineer building HIPAA-compliant, real-time healthcare systems: owned a Python/Flask API layer for an AI-enabled patient engagement and risk scoring service, implemented PHI-safe logging and cross-service auditability, and delivered Kubernetes microservices via ArgoCD GitOps. Also has experience with Kafka streaming pipelines and hybrid cloud-to-on-prem migrations in regulated healthcare/fintech environments.”

“LLM/MLOps engineer who has shipped production systems for complaint intelligence and contact-center NLU, including LoRA/RLHF-tuned LLaMA models deployed on GKE with vLLM and Vertex AI batch pipelines to BigQuery. Demonstrates strong practical focus on hallucination control, data imbalance mitigation, and production monitoring (Langfuse) with regression testing and canary rollouts, plus experience orchestrating complex workflows with AWS Step Functions.”

“Full-stack developer who built a learning management web app end-to-end using React, Spring Boot, and MySQL, integrating APIs via Axios and validating/testing with Postman. Has experience handling data-heavy workloads (courses, quiz results) and improving performance with pagination, and is comfortable designing microservice-style endpoints with CI/CD considerations.”

“AI/ML engineer (Cognizant) who built a production, real-time credit card fraud detection platform combining deep-learning anomaly detection with an LLM-based explanation layer. Strong focus on regulated deployment: addressed class imbalance and feature drift, and added guardrails (SHAP/structured inputs, fine-tuning on analyst reports, rule-based validation) to keep explanations accurate and compliant. Orchestrated the full pipeline with Airflow + Databricks/Spark and used MLflow/Prometheus plus A/B and shadow deployments for measurable reliability.”

“Backend-focused full-stack engineer who built an MVP at Neon AI for PhD students: a FastAPI backend integrating multiple cloud and local LLMs plus a RAG pipeline with session/identity management, designed to be modular and extensible across domains. Also has VMware experience debugging production issues and executing safe, API-compatible refactors with staged rollouts and strong security controls.”

“Associate Director in commercial technology leading Salesforce platform delivery (Sales Cloud + Health Cloud) for patient engagement and order management. Personally led secure integrations like Bartender Cloud label/barcode generation (PDF creation, encryption, malware scanning) and owned a major StreamSets-based Salesforce data sync incident triggered by a Salesforce region move, adding proactive monitoring and automated DR/failover. Experienced in scaling delivery via CI/CD, release cadence, and leading teams through architecture reviews, code reviews, and lead-to-cash automation.”

“Backend/data platform engineer who owned a production merchant-activity aggregation and event publishing system processing ~500k merchants daily. Built a Snowflake-based daily KPI summarization pipeline orchestrated via AWS Glue/SQS and an ECS Spring Boot publisher that encrypts and publishes events to Kafka, with strong operational monitoring and reconciliation. Drove major scalability wins (10x throughput) via caching around encryption/key-management and designed selective reprocessing to handle late-arriving data cost-effectively.”

“Backend/data-systems SWE (2 years) who has built production ETL/streaming workflows (Kafka, Debezium, Elasticsearch) and troubleshot real SQL performance regressions caused by indexing/type issues. Also ships full-stack personal projects in Next.js App Router + TypeScript with Postgres, emphasizing reliability via constraints, idempotency, and strong observability (Grafana/Kibana).”

“Backend/microservices engineer with fintech loan-lifecycle experience operating low-latency (sub-250ms) services in production using Kafka, idempotent transaction design, and Datadog observability. Also built an end-to-end LLM chatbot (React + Flask) with a decoupled model integration layer (FLAN-T5 via Hugging Face) and has experience designing partner-facing REST APIs with OAuth2/JWT and Swagger documentation.”

“Built and shipped a production LLM-powered multi-agent system that autonomously generates and publishes YouTube videos end-to-end (trend discovery, script writing, image/caption generation, timestamped video assembly). Emphasizes production readiness with extensive automated testing, Redis/Postgres/TimescaleDB state orchestration, and Prometheus/Grafana monitoring, reporting ~100x faster content production and improved engagement/viewership.”