Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“Aspiring founder exploring an AI automation startup focused on automating processes involved in building companies. Not yet developed specific use cases or raised capital, but describes a clear plan to validate ideas through use-case research, building a pilot, and testing with early customers; not familiar with the VC/accelerator landscape yet.”

“Fitbit engineer who has taken multiple projects from concept to release, including architecting a new warranty-evaluation system that achieved 100% accuracy and saved the company $6M. Interested in exploring startup ideas and emphasizes mission alignment and building strong cross-functional teams.”

“Entrepreneurially minded builder focused on proving architecture concepts via minimal demo prototypes for marketing. Has hands-on experience improving an A/B experimentation framework by interviewing stakeholders, identifying system limits and bottlenecks, and defining success criteria to scale experimentation and speed up analysis.”

“Backend/data engineer with Amazon supply-chain experience building production serverless Python services and ETL pipelines on AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, S3, RDS, Glue). Has modernized legacy SAS jobs into Python with rigorous parity testing and phased migrations, and has delivered major SQL performance gains (minutes down to seconds) through indexing and partitioning.”

“Backend/data engineer from Oscar Health specializing in healthcare claims systems on AWS. Built HIPAA-compliant real-time services (FastAPI/Postgres/Kafka on EKS) and serverless ingestion pipelines, and led modernization of a legacy SAS claims pricing system to Python/Spark with rigorous parity validation. Demonstrated measurable impact with high uptime/low latency services and major Snowflake performance and cost reductions.”

“Backend/data engineer with hands-on production experience across GCP (FastAPI microservices on Kubernetes) and AWS (Lambda, ECS Fargate, Glue). Has modernized legacy SAS batch systems into Python services with parallel-run parity validation, and has strong operational rigor in ETL reliability/monitoring plus proven SQL tuning impact (25s to <300ms, ~60% CPU reduction).”

“Built and shipped a production LLM-powered medical scribe that generates structured clinical visit summaries using RAG, strict JSON schemas, and post-generation validation to reduce hallucinations. Experienced in making LLM workflows deterministic and observable (structured logging/metrics/tracing) and in evaluation-driven iteration with metrics like schema pass rate and edit rate; collaborated closely with clinicians and policy stakeholders at Scale AI to drive adoption.”

“Backend/platform engineer with experience at Microsoft, Uber, and Gusto building production AI-agent automation systems in Python (AutoGen) and cloud-native microservices on Kubernetes across AWS/Azure. Has delivered zero-downtime migrations and high-throughput real-time streaming pipelines (Kafka/WebSockets/Redis), and is strong in GitOps/ArgoCD-driven CI/CD with reliable rollouts and rapid rollback.”

“Built and shipped a real-time AI phone agent for small businesses that handles bookings/FAQs/messages using streaming ASR, an LLM with tool-calling, and TTS; deployed to production for multiple paying customers. Demonstrates strong applied LLM reliability practices (tool-first grounding, retrieval, hard-negative testing, and production monitoring) and experience orchestrating multi-step AI workflows with Airflow, Prefect, and AWS Step Functions.”

“Player-coach backend leader at PostLo who led a major backend architecture upgrade to enable AI-driven features by separating transactional systems from AI workloads (vector embeddings/image validation) and adding async processing for heavy jobs. Also owned production reliability improvements (query/index optimization, workload isolation, monitoring and load testing) and translated an ambiguous retention goal into a shipped cashback rewards feature with auditable transactions.”

“Backend/AI engineer who built a production GPU-backed real-time inference API at Nvidia and debugged burst-induced tail latency, cutting P95 by ~29% through dynamic batching and backpressure. Also shipped an end-to-end RAG + agentic operational diagnostics assistant with strict tool controls, evidence citation, confidence gating, and strong production guardrails, plus demonstrated hands-on Postgres optimization (900ms to 40–60ms).”

“Data engineer focused on building and operating reliable Airflow-orchestrated pipelines into BigQuery, including daily billing ingestion (~1GB/day) and ad platform (Facebook/LinkedIn) data collection. Implemented end-to-end data quality checks plus org-wide incident response automation integrating PagerDuty, Slack, and Jira, and has experience executing large backfills (4–5TB) via time-window batching.”