Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“Candidate brings an operator-to-founder profile with leadership experience in IT and Business Systems and a strong grasp of how ideas become venture-backable products. They speak fluently about startup evaluation criteria such as TAM, technical defensibility, speed to scale, and AI differentiation, and appear especially motivated by building solutions end-to-end in startup or venture studio environments.”

Dhananjay Sharma

Screened ReferencesModerate rec.

Mid-level Full-Stack Engineer specializing in AI and FinTech platforms

Stony Brook, NY6y exp

“Full-stack engineer who built RegArt’s product from 0→1 for enterprise compliance users at clients like HSBC and EY, including the production React frontend, backend APIs, and an LLM-powered search experience. Particularly compelling for startups needing someone who can move across UI, API, and data layers, make pragmatic architecture tradeoffs, and ship fast without over-engineering.”

“Backend-focused engineer with deep Java/Spring expertise in fintech and SaaS integrations, including high-scale financial data pipelines and partner-facing APIs. Most notably re-platformed a 100M+ record ETL system to a custom concurrent Spring Batch architecture that cut failures dramatically and reduced infrastructure costs by over 90%, while also leading enterprise-grade event-driven integrations for customers like Bosch and Amazon.”

“Frontend engineer with experience at Target, Fortinet, and Groupon, focused on complex browser UI modernization and performance. Notable work includes rebuilding Target's internal uploader to support nearly 1GB uploads with granular progress/retry UX, and helping Fortinet incrementally migrate a large Jinja-based application to Vue to improve responsiveness and reduce backend load.”

“Hands-on production engineer with deep Oracle tuning and observability-driven troubleshooting experience in a 24x7 healthcare system used by pharmacists across the U.S. While not yet hands-on with GCP databases, they bring strong transferable cloud and platform experience from AWS/Azure, including migration work, memory leak remediation, HA/DR operations, and end-to-end performance debugging across DB, JVM, and network layers.”

“Full-stack engineer with end-to-end ownership across React/TypeScript frontends, Spring Boot/Node microservices, and production ops on Docker/Kubernetes and AWS (ECS/CloudWatch). Built real-time healthcare eligibility and analytics systems at Cigna and an early-stage seller onboarding platform at Flipkart, driving measurable performance gains (35–40% latency/throughput improvements) through event-driven Kafka pipelines, Redis caching, and strong reliability/observability practices.”

“Built and deployed a production LLM-powered multi-agent compliance copilot (life sciences/finance) using LangChain/LangGraph + RAG over vector databases, delivered via async FastAPI on Kubernetes. Emphasizes audit-ready, deterministic outputs with schema constraints and citations, plus rigorous evaluation/monitoring; reports 60%+ reduction in manual research time and successful production adoption.”

“Built a production GenAI-powered analytics assistant to reduce reliance on data analysts by enabling natural-language Q&A over Databricks/Power BI dashboards, backed by vector search (Pinecone/Milvus) and a Neo4j knowledge graph, including multimodal support via OpenAI Vision. Demonstrates strong real-world LLM reliability engineering with strict RAG, LangGraph multi-step verification, and Guardrails/custom validators, plus broad orchestration and production monitoring experience (Airflow, ADF, Step Functions, Kubernetes, Prometheus/CloudWatch).”

“ML/NLP engineer currently working in NYC on a system that connects complex unstructured data sources to deliver personalized insights, using embeddings + vector DB retrieval and a RAG architecture (LangChain, Pinecone/OpenSearch). Strong focus on production constraints—especially low-latency retrieval—using FAISS/ANN, PCA, index partitioning, and Redis caching, plus PEFT fine-tuning (LoRA/QLoRA) and KPI/SLA-driven promotion to production.”

“Built and shipped a real-time oncology risk prediction system used by doctors during patient visits, trained on clinical data in AWS SageMaker and deployed via FastAPI with sub-second responses. Emphasizes clinician-trust features (SHAP explainability, validation checks) and HIPAA-compliant controls (encryption, RBAC, audit logging), plus Kubernetes-based production operations with autoscaling, monitoring, and drift/retraining workflows; collaborated closely with oncologists at Flatiron Health.”

“Software engineer with strong compliance-domain experience who built a customer-facing compliance and reporting dashboard using React/TypeScript with Spring Boot microservices. Demonstrates mature production engineering practices—contract-first APIs, event-driven architecture (Kafka/RabbitMQ), caching (Redis), and robust CI/CD + observability (Prometheus/Grafana/ELK)—and also created a Python-based audit automation tool adopted into the standard release process.”

“Product-focused full-stack engineer with Walmart and Dell experience who built and shipped a real-time engagement dashboard end-to-end (Kafka Streams, Spring Boot, React/TypeScript/D3) used daily by business teams, moving them from next-day reports to real-time decisioning. Strong in performance/reliability (Redis caching cut latency ~40%, 90%+ test coverage, Prometheus/CloudWatch monitoring) and production operations on AWS/EKS including handling a cascading failure from a memory leak with zero-downtime rollback and redeploy.”

“LLM engineer who built a production seller-support RAG system at eBay using hybrid retrieval (BM25 + Pinecone vectors) with Cohere reranking, LangGraph orchestration, and citation-grounded answers. Strong focus on reliability: semantic/structure-aware chunking, automated Ragas-based evaluation with nightly regressions, and production observability (LangSmith) plus drift monitoring (Arize). Also implemented a multi-agent fraud pipeline with AutoGen using JSON-schema contracts and explicit termination conditions.”

“Full-stack engineer who built an enterprise search platform (Codlens) delivering natural-language Q&A over Jira/Slack using embeddings, vector DB search, re-ranking (RRF), and LLM responses with source grounding. Also designed and benchmarked a distributed IAM system with Postgres transaction-log replication and Raft-based quorum consistency, reporting ~253 TPS at ~60ms latency in a multi-node setup. Experience spans early-stage startups (Zetic AI, Sagwara Capital) and large-scale orgs (Akamai, Atlassian).”

Anvith Reddy Dodda

Screened

Mid-level AI Engineer specializing in GenAI, NLP, and MLOps

Remote, USA3y exp

“LLM/agentic-systems engineer with PayPal experience hardening an LLM-powered fraud support assistant from prototype to production, focusing on low-latency distributed architecture, rigorous evaluation/testing, and security/compliance. Comfortable in customer-facing and GTM contexts—runs technical demos/workshops, builds tailored pilots, and aligns sales/CS with engineering to close deals and drive adoption.”