Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

Aakash Khepar

Screened

Mid-level Full-Stack AI Engineer specializing in agentic AI systems

Tempe, AZ4y exp

“AI/full-stack builder with hands-on experience shipping healthcare, career-tech, nonprofit, and fintech products, spanning speech AI, browser extensions, agentic RAG systems, and enterprise ML monitoring. Stands out for combining strong technical depth with measurable outcomes, including reducing clinical call WER from 26% to 3%, building safe tool-using agents with rollback/RBAC, and delivering zero-to-one multi-tenant platform features in ambiguous environments.”

“Software engineer with Intuit experience shipping an end-to-end real-time financial insights product on AWS, using event-driven architecture with Kafka and Spark Streaming to process millions of records with low latency. Also delivers customer-facing React + TypeScript dashboards and has hands-on production operations experience, including resolving a database scaling incident via read replicas, query tuning, and connection pooling.”

“Backend/ML engineer who built production LLM-enabled systems at PRGX, including an interpretable contract opportunity scoring engine (Bradley-Terry pairwise ranking) that reached 0.82 weighted Spearman agreement with SME auditors and was integrated into workflow. Also built a Duke student advisor chatbot and hardened it for real-world reliability/security with schema-driven tool calling, normalization, and off-domain defenses; led staged production rollouts with shadow testing and achieved 0.90 F1 on a new extraction field before shipping.”

“AI/ML practitioner with Northern Trust experience who has shipped production LLM systems (internal support assistant) using RAG, vector databases, orchestration (LangChain/custom pipelines), and rigorous monitoring/feedback loops. Also built AI-driven fraud detection/risk monitoring solutions in a regulated financial environment, emphasizing explainability (SHAP), audit readiness, and stakeholder trust through dashboards and clear communication.”

“At JP Morgan Chase, built and deployed a production LLM-powered RAG knowledge assistant to help fraud investigators and risk analysts quickly navigate regulatory updates and internal policies, reducing investigation delays and compliance risk. Strong focus on secure retrieval (RBAC filtering), reliability (layered testing + observability), and production constraints (latency/SLOs), with Airflow-orchestrated, auditable ML pipelines.”

“Built and deployed a production LLM/RAG document automation system for business documents (contracts/claim forms) that extracts schema-validated JSON, generates grounded summaries/Q&A, and integrates into transaction systems via APIs. Emphasizes real-world reliability: hallucination controls, layout-aware parsing with OCR fallback, Step Functions-orchestrated workflows with retries/timeouts, and human-in-the-loop review designed in close partnership with operations and claims stakeholders.”

“Built and shipped a production LLM-powered personalized client engagement assistant in the financial domain, balancing real-time recommendations with strict privacy/compliance requirements. Demonstrates strong MLOps/LLMOps depth (Airflow + MLflow, containerized microservices, drift monitoring) and a privacy-by-design approach validated in collaboration with risk and compliance teams.”

“Enterprise platform engineer/product owner who led end-to-end delivery of customer-facing ServiceNow Service Catalog/workflow solutions, emphasizing reliability, security, and fast iteration. Built React/TypeScript portals with Node.js and Spring Boot backends, and improved microservices reliability at scale using Kafka, monitoring, and robust retry/timeout patterns.”

“Backend engineer focused on Python/FastAPI microservices, with hands-on experience deploying to AWS (EKS/ECR) via Jenkins and GitOps-style workflows using ArgoCD. Has built and stabilized real-time Kafka payment-event streaming pipelines and improved production performance under peak load through Redis caching, SQL optimization, and robust retry/DLQ patterns. Also supported phased migrations from on-prem environments to AWS with gradual traffic shifting and monitoring.”

“Built and productionized an autonomous research agent (AutoGPT) in a Docker/Kubernetes environment with Pinecone-based long-term memory and custom Python tools for analysis, visualization, and report drafting. Implemented layered guardrails (prompt templates, automated validation, self-critique loops, and monitoring) and achieved ~25% reduction in manual report generation time while scaling the workflow to support multiple concurrent users.”

“Full-stack engineer (backend-led) with recent experience building enterprise workflow orchestration and billing/payment platforms at Intuit using Java/Spring Boot (WebFlux), Kafka, Postgres/Redis, and React/TypeScript. Has operated at high scale (reported ~1200 RPS during month-end billing) and focuses on event-driven microservices, real-time UI updates via streaming, and disciplined API evolution with contract testing.”

“Backend/platform engineer with payments domain experience, having owned core services for MasterCard’s global card tokenization and settlement platform. Built Django/Celery microservices plus Kafka/Redis real-time fraud streaming, delivering 27% latency improvement, sub-100ms fraud checks, and 18% fewer false positives. Strong DevOps/IaC background across Kubernetes, AWS ECS, Terraform, GitHub Actions, and GitOps practices for high-scale transaction systems (including UPI at PhonePe).”

“Built a lightweight internal JavaScript analytics tracker capturing user interactions (clicks, page views, custom events) with debounced batching, automatic session tracking, and offline event caching via a localStorage-backed append-only queue. Demonstrates practical performance optimization mindset (profiling, memoization/caching) and React performance tuning.”

“GenAI/data engineering practitioner with production experience across Equinix, Optum, and Citibank—built an Azure OpenAI (GPT-4) + LangChain document intelligence platform processing 1.5M+ docs/month and a HIPAA-compliant Airflow healthcare pipeline handling 5M+ claims/day. Also delivered a real-time fraud detection + explainability system using LightGBM and a fine-tuned T5 NLG component, improving fraud accuracy by 15%+ while partnering closely with compliance stakeholders.”

“Engineering leader who proposed and delivered a new API-based document management platform to replace a vendor-dependent system, improving latency by ~1s and availability to 99.9% while migrating legacy data. Also drove Python-based automation of ~12 workflows via third-party API integrations and led an SSO/auth integration focused on backward compatibility and high login success rates.”

“Backend/platform engineer from Fanatics sportsbook core team with deep experience in real-time ingestion systems (Kafka) and high-throughput performance optimization. Delivered an 87% latency reduction on a Java API handling hundreds of thousands of updates per second, and improved reliability of shared internal libraries via deterministic recovery logic, strong testing, and feature-flagged rollouts.”

“Machine learning/NLP engineer who built a production-oriented retrieval-based AI system at Morgan Stanley for healthcare use cases, combining RAG over unstructured patient records with deep-learning medical image segmentation (U-Net/Mask R-CNN). Strong in end-to-end pipelines and MLOps (Spark/MongoDB, AWS SageMaker, CI/CD, monitoring, automated retraining) and in entity resolution/data quality validation for noisy clinical data.”

“Software engineer in the mortgage/financial services domain (Freddie Mac) who builds end-to-end loan origination and credit risk capabilities using Spring Boot microservices, Angular dashboards, and data pipelines. Delivered measurable impact (30% reduction in underwriting turnaround time) and emphasizes production reliability/compliance with strong guardrails, observability, and evaluation loops for risk scoring systems.”

“Uber engineer who has owned internal products end-to-end across backend (Spring Boot microservices, MySQL) and frontend (React), including performance optimization and secure JWT-based auth. Also shipped a production internal RAG/embeddings LLM support assistant over policy docs and support tickets, with guardrails (confidence thresholds, human review) and an evaluation loop that directly reduced hallucinations.”

“Data engineering-focused candidate (internship/project experience) who built end-to-end pipelines processing a few million transactional records/day for fraud detection and reporting, using Airflow, Python/SQL, and PySpark with strong emphasis on data quality gates, idempotency, and monitoring. Also implemented an external web/API data collection system with anti-bot tactics and schema-change quarantine, and shipped a versioned Flask API to serve curated warehouse data.”

“Senior software engineer (5+ years) from Walmart Global Tech who owned and operated high-scale supplier inventory submission systems, including a microservice handling submissions up to 500k items and a data platform processing ~10TB/day. Strong in AWS/Kubernetes (EKS), Kafka/Spark streaming + batch pipelines, and production operations (on-call, metrics/alerting), with demonstrated performance wins (30% faster responses, 50% faster processing).”

Allan Farinas

Screened

Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in Python and AWS

West Covina, CA11y exp

“Backend/data engineer who has built production Python microservices (FastAPI) and AWS-native platforms for event ingestion and analytics, combining ECS/Fargate + Lambda with CloudFormation-driven environments and strong secrets/IAM practices. Experienced modernizing legacy logic with parallel-run parity validation and safe phased cutovers, and has demonstrated measurable SQL tuning wins (20–30s down to 1–2s) plus incident ownership in Glue/Step Functions ETL pipelines.”

Hardik Goyal

Screened

Senior Integration Developer specializing in enterprise automation and data integration

United States4y exp

“Frontend-focused engineer with experience building and optimizing React-based dashboards and reusable component libraries in a multi-team, internal open-source-style environment at Merck (ClearSight Forecasting Dashboard). Also handled production user issues on a live streaming platform (GameSee.tv) and built a financial application from scratch at Manipal Business Solutions, owning backend services, middle-tier APIs, and third-party integrations.”