Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

Brian Gomez

Screened

Senior Machine Learning Engineer specializing in AI/ML, NLP, and computer vision

United States12y exp

“McKinsey & Company ML/NLP practitioner who builds production-grade AI systems across sectors (notably healthcare and finance), including RAG/LLM solutions, entity resolution pipelines, and embedding-powered search with vector databases. Demonstrated measurable impact (40% reduction in data duplication) and strong MLOps/data workflow practices (Airflow, MLflow, Spark, AWS/GCP, Prometheus, CI/CD).”

“Backend/data engineer with production experience at Uber building a near real-time driver rewards service on AWS (FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Redis) with strong reliability and concurrency controls. Also delivered AWS Lambda/ECS containerized deployments with GitHub Actions CI/CD and cost governance, built AWS Glue ETL with schema-evolution handling, and drove a ~10x SQL performance improvement while owning incident response via CloudWatch.”

“NVIDIA engineer who built and shipped a production LLM-powered enterprise knowledge system (summarization, transcription, and Q&A) that cut document retrieval time ~30%. Deep hands-on experience with RAG (FAISS/Pinecone), GPU-accelerated microservices on AWS, and reliability/safety practices (Guardrails AI, prompt A/B testing, canary releases) plus strong MLOps orchestration across Airflow, Step Functions, and Kubernetes GitOps.”

Maria Li

Screened

Entry-Level Firmware Engineer specializing in embedded–cloud systems

New York, NY2y exp

“Backend engineer at Samsara with prior Amazon internship experience; built an internal Python chatbot for documentation discovery with a full security model (authn/authz and credential-based response filtering) in a sensitive environment. Currently works on dashcam/device-backend systems, including feature-flagged migrations for audio alert behavior and resilient real-time gRPC streaming under unreliable cellular connectivity, while actively monitoring Buildkite/Toolshed CI/CD rollouts.”

Chang Qian

Screened

Senior Backend/Infrastructure Engineer specializing in large-scale integrity and content systems

Menlo Park, CA10y exp

“Backend/platform engineer who built Bilibili’s "Avalon" content moderation platform from a vague CEO mandate into a company-wide service (Go, gRPC, Kafka), including on-call, metrics, transparency tools, and multi-site resiliency work. More recently at Meta, scaled a high-traffic mistake-prevention platform by introducing capacity levers (prefiltering, caching, log sampling, fanout limits) and navigating org-wide constraints, including debugging a rule-engine threading bottleneck.”

Sahitya Thota

Screened

Staff/Tech Lead Software Engineer specializing in identity, data platforms, and cloud systems

Fremont, CA20y exp

“Engineering leader/player-coach who built and owned end-to-end sales-facing data products, including a 360° advertiser insights platform and a sales AI agent for natural-language access to insights. Demonstrated strong architecture and reliability chops (event-driven redesign to eliminate Hive-query throttling; batching/caching to reduce fan-out) plus incident ownership around ads attribution consistency. Also has 0→1 experience building graph-based recommendation/matching systems with explainability and tight user feedback loops.”

“Founder building an enterprise agentic AI startup who has already raised about $100K (friends & family plus self-funding). Has prior and current experience engaging VCs (including outreach to both large and small firms) and emphasizes demo-driven pitching, enterprise customer validation, and targeting billion-dollar market opportunities.”

“Backend/full-stack engineer with experience building large-scale systems on Salesforce and eBay, including a sharded Oracle-backed personalization store used by millions of sellers and a Spring Boot microservice that executes scheduled payouts at high volume. Emphasizes production readiness via state-machine-based idempotency, strong observability (Splunk/Elasticsearch/PagerDuty), and extensive Selenium/Sauce Labs automation.”

“Backend/AI engineer currently at Stripe building Minions, an internal LLM-based developer agent that automates code generation, bug fixes, and PR creation. They combine strong production LLM architecture skills with reliability engineering, having improved routine PR merge times by ~40-45%, lowered post-merge bug rates by 12%, and previously built an invoice-processing pipeline that achieved 91% straight-through processing in a B2B payments context.”