Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“Full-stack engineer whose strongest hands-on work is a self-built real-time collaborative code editor spanning React, Node.js, Express, and WebSockets. They stand out for owning both product UX and backend synchronization challenges, with a clear bias toward simplicity, low-latency collaboration, and modular architecture in early-stage product building.”

“Serial venture builder/operator across ad tech, media delivery, search engines, international content management, and ecommerce; has raised up to $150M and been involved in 8 acquisitions or IP-acquisition events. Known for refactoring/re-engineering smaller or troubled platforms into higher-value businesses, including building yield-management algorithms and a Kafka-like system to improve ad delivery profitability.”

“Robotics software engineer with autonomous driving lab experience at UCSD, building and optimizing ROS2 perception and control pipelines (camera-based real-time object detection) with a strong focus on low-latency performance and robust message interfaces. Also brings production deployment experience from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, using Docker and Kubernetes for containerized environments and deployment pipelines.”

“Backend/founding-engineer-style builder who designed and evolved a near-real-time customer churn prediction platform (FastAPI + AWS SageMaker/Lambda + Redis + MLflow) to enable real-time retention actions, reporting ~18% churn reduction. Demonstrates strong production engineering in secure API design, incremental migrations with data integrity safeguards, and robustness improvements in async pipelines (idempotency, DLQs, retry visibility).”

“Built and deployed a production LLM-based real-time stance detection system for social media, fine-tuning LLaMA 3.1 on A100s with DeepSpeed ZeRO/FSDP and iteratively refining data to handle sarcasm and context-dependent meaning. Also has Kubernetes operations experience (Kafka/Logstash/Elasticsearch observability pipeline) and delivered an OCR automation project during a Worley India internship that saved 20+ hours/week for on-site energy safety stakeholders.”

“Built and shipped a production LLM/RAG risk-case summarization and triage system used by fraud/compliance analysts, with strong grounding controls (evidence-cited outputs and refusal on low confidence). Demonstrates end-to-end ownership across retrieval quality, Airflow-orchestrated indexing pipelines, and compliance-grade privacy (PII redaction, RBAC, encrypted redacted logging, and auditable prompt/model versioning) plus a tight feedback loop with non-technical domain experts.”

“GenAI/ML engineer from Lucid Motors who built and productionized an LLM-powered RAG diagnostic assistant for manufacturing and maintenance teams, deployed on AWS with Docker/Kubernetes and MLflow. Demonstrates end-to-end ownership from retrieval/prompt design to scalability, monitoring, and workflow integration via APIs, plus production ML pipeline orchestration with Kubeflow (Spark/Kafka + TensorFlow) for predictive maintenance use cases.”

“Backend engineer at Goldman Sachs who deployed internal LLM-powered utilities to summarize operational logs/tickets, with a strong emphasis on data sensitivity and reliability. Built deterministic workflows with template-based prompts, confidence checks, and rule-based fallbacks, and used monitoring plus failure-rate metrics to tune performance; also has hands-on Temporal orchestration experience for resilient async backend jobs.”

“Built and deployed a production LLM-powered RAG assistant for semiconductor manufacturing failure analysis, reducing engineer triage effort by grounding outputs in retrieved evidence and gating responses with SPC + ML signals (LSTM anomaly scores, XGBoost probabilities). Experienced with LangChain/LangGraph to ship reliable, observable multi-step agents with branching/fallback logic, and evaluates impact using both technical metrics and business KPIs like mean time to triage and downtime reduction.”

“Early-career technologist with internship experience deploying and fixing production/demo service configurations despite poor documentation, using step-through debugging and prior demo references to restore progress quickly. Also has hands-on IT technician experience diagnosing hardware failures (hard drive damage), recovering files, and replacing drives, plus QA test development in Python for customer-reported bugs and a strong focus on networking (monitoring, IP activity analysis).”

“Software engineer with hands-on experience improving performance and reliability in financial workflows (settlements/loan processing), spanning React/TypeScript and Angular frontends plus Spring Boot microservices. Has delivered measurable latency improvements using PostgreSQL optimization and Redis caching, and has operated Kafka-based systems at scale with idempotent processing and backoff/retry strategies while iterating internal ops tooling with support/finance teams.”

“Software engineer/product-focused builder who has delivered customer-facing dashboards (React/TypeScript + Spring Boot) and microservices using RabbitMQ, emphasizing safe, fast iteration with CI/CD, feature flags, and monitoring. Also built an internal monitoring/reporting tool adopted by ops/support by involving users early and iterating based on feedback.”

“Software engineer working on an e-commerce platform, currently building a RAG-based recommendation system with a team new to the technology. Has delivered an end-to-end React/TypeScript website for a local car dealer and built an internal "encryption as a service" tool to secure sensitive data across repositories and through release/UAT, with experience debugging microservices integration issues.”

“Built and owned major parts of a real-time distributed AI fraud-detection pipeline (ingestion, inference microservice integration, and automated action layer), optimizing latency and observability and reducing false positives by ~35%. Understands ROS/ROS2 concepts (nodes/topics/services) and planned hands-on ramp-up via ROS2 pub/sub exercises and Gazebo simulation, but has not worked on physical robots or ROS in production.”

“AI/ML engineer with production experience building LLM-powered document intelligence and customer support systems in healthcare/insurance, emphasizing high-accuracy RAG, long-document processing, and robust monitoring/fallback mechanisms. Also automates and scales ML lifecycle workflows using Apache Airflow and Kubeflow, and partners closely with non-technical operations stakeholders to drive adoption.”

“ML/NLP practitioner with experience building a transformer-failure prediction system that combines sensor signals with unstructured maintenance comments using LLM-based extraction and similarity validation. Strong emphasis on production readiness—data leakage controls, SQL-driven data quality tiers, and rigorous bias/fairness validation (including contract/spec evaluation across diverse company profiles).”

“Infrastructure-leaning engineer who has built real-time ML systems end-to-end: a Jetson-deployed adaptive Whisper ASR service (Flask + WebSockets, React/TS UI) and a high-throughput Postgres schema for live transcription. Also delivered customer-facing AI billing/OCR improvements for a dental startup (Dentite), boosting OCR performance by 38%, and has experience instrumenting open-source ML deployment stacks to add infrastructure visibility.”

“Full-stack engineer with e-commerce experience who shipped and owned an order history dashboard using Next.js App Router/TypeScript, combining server components for SEO/perf with client-side interactivity via React Query. Has backend reliability experience (Temporal order-processing workflows, Postgres modeling/indexing, and payment API idempotency keys), and emphasizes production stability, observability, and zero-incident launches.”

“Data engineer with experience delivering an end-to-end pipeline handling ~3.5TB in a star-schema setup (fact + dimensions) and producing business-facing tables in Hive/Spark. Identified and resolved UAT-reported duplicate issues caused by joins through root-cause analysis, and also built automation to run Spark SQL metrics on weekly/monthly/quarterly cadences and distribute results to users.”

“Data engineer with experience at Sony and Walmart building high-volume, near-real-time analytics and ingestion systems. Has owned end-to-end pipelines from Kafka/Spark streaming through S3/Parquet and Redshift/Looker, emphasizing data quality (Great Expectations), observability (CloudWatch/Azure Monitor), and reliability (Airflow SLAs, retries, checkpointing), including measurable performance and latency improvements.”

“Data engineer focused on fraud and banking analytics who has owned end-to-end batch + streaming pipelines at very large scale (hundreds of millions of records/day). Built robust data quality/observability layers (schema validation, anomaly detection, alerting) and delivered low-latency serving via AWS Lambda/API Gateway with DynamoDB + Redis, plus external data ingestion/scraping pipelines orchestrated in Airflow with anti-bot protections.”

Mahesh Kumar Duvvuri

Screened

Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in microservices and cloud-native systems

New York City, NY4y exp

“Backend/infra engineer with experience across Nestle, J.P. Morgan, and Capgemini, combining ML systems work (YOLOv8/PyTorch object detection with TFLite edge deployment) with production-grade cloud/Kubernetes operations. Has delivered measurable impact via AWS migrations (25% cost reduction, 99.9% availability), microservice modernization (35% faster processing), and low-latency Kafka streaming for financial dashboards (<100ms) using DLQs and idempotent consumers.”