Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“Backend/platform engineer who has built and run production Python/Flask + Kafka microservices processing RFID and camera/RFID fusion streams for near-real-time retail cart updates at ~4–5M events/day. Strong in reliability/performance debugging (p99 latency, Kafka lag, Cosmos DB RU hot partitions) with measurable impact including ~30% database cost reduction, and has also shipped an end-to-end vulnerability scanning workflow with DynamoDB-backed state, idempotency, and robust retry/verification guardrails.”

“Backend/data platform engineer who recently owned an end-to-end large-scale financial data platform delivering real-time decision support for finance and operations. Has hands-on experience modernizing legacy batch pipelines into AWS cloud-native ELT with parallel-run cutovers, strong data quality controls (dbt-style tests, reconciliation), and measurable improvements in runtime, cost, and SLA compliance. Also builds scalable, secure FastAPI microservices using Docker, ALB-based horizontal scaling, Redis caching, and managed auth with Cognito/Supabase plus Postgres RLS.”

“Built and deployed a production LLM/RAG clinical decision support system that enables real-time semantic search over unstructured EHR notes and delivers patient risk insights. Strong in healthcare-grade MLOps and compliance (HIPAA, PHI handling, encryption, RBAC, audit logs) and scaled embedding/retrieval pipelines using Spark/Databricks and Airflow. Partnered with clinicians via Power BI dashboards and explainability, contributing to an 18% reduction in patient readmissions.”

“Built and deployed an enterprise GenAI knowledge assistant over thousands of internal PDFs/reports using a RAG stack (GPT-4 + Hugging Face embeddings + vector DB) to reduce manual search and SME escalations. Uses LangGraph/LangChain to orchestrate modular agent workflows with relevance filtering and fallback handling, and applies rigorous evaluation (golden datasets, edge cases, A/B tests) with production monitoring metrics.”

“AI/LLM engineer with production experience at Charles Schwab building a RAG-based assistant to help 5,000+ reps answer complex financial policy questions. Implemented a multi-layer anti-hallucination approach (GNN-driven ontology/graph retrieval + citation-only answers) and compliance-focused guardrails (Azure AI Content Safety) in partnership with audit/compliance stakeholders.”

“Interned at Zonda where he built an AI-driven semantic search solution over ~280M housing/builder records. Iterated from local LLMs via llama.cpp quantization to a vector-embedding retrieval system, then boosted semantic accuracy with a custom spaCy NER layer and re-ranking, optimizing for latency through precomputation. Collaborated with economics-focused stakeholders to reduce manual document/paperwork time by enabling natural-language search over internal data.”

“Engineer with banking and industrial/IoT experience who has deployed a payment-processing microservice with zero downtime, handling Protobuf schema evolution and sensitive data migration via dual-write/checksum techniques. Demonstrates strong cross-stack troubleshooting (pinpointed intermittent distributed timeouts to a failing ToR switch port) and customer-facing Python ETL customization using plugin-based parsers and Pydantic validation, plus hands-on monitoring/alerting improvements with operators.”

“Built and deployed a production LLM-powered internal documentation assistant using embeddings, a vector database, and a RAG pipeline to reduce time spent searching PDFs/manuals. Experienced in orchestrating end-to-end LLM workflows with Airflow/LangChain, improving reliability via monitoring/error handling, and driving measurable quality through retrieval and hallucination-focused evaluation metrics.”

“Built and productionized an LLM-powered PDF document Q&A system to eliminate manual searching through long documents, focusing on scalability and answer reliability. Implemented semantic chunking (using headings/paragraphs/tables), overlap, and preprocessing/quality checks to reduce hallucinations, and orchestrated the end-to-end pipeline with Airflow using retries, alerts, and parallel tasks.”

“Software developer with healthcare operations experience at Epic Systems (Referrals & Authorizations), delivering customer-facing tooling to speed manual insurance authorization/denial documentation and support future automation. Also supported an HRIS migration to Workday at Aloe Yoga, solving legacy ID interoperability via scripting and mapping, and demonstrates strong production debugging and test-driven maintainability practices.”

“Full-stack engineer with 3+ years using Java/Spring Boot (Citi) and React, who built a production observability dashboard monitoring 53 microservices across 17 clusters with real-time health/latency tracing and significant performance improvements (cut load time from ~10s). Also designed a serverless AWS face-recognition system (Lambda/S3/SQS) built to handle burst traffic (~1000 concurrent requests), demonstrating strength in scalable, event-driven architectures.”

“Engineering leader/CTO-type with deep experience building and scaling a vehicle routing platform at Transdev On Demand, including a nationwide rollout to 22 US airports ahead of schedule. Drove engineering best practices (CI/CD, high test coverage, pair programming, automated deployments) and led a multi-tenant architectural upgrade to expand the routing engine to additional business lines and external customers.”

“Researcher from the University of South Dakota who built a production medical RAG system to help interpret model predictions by retrieving relevant clinical notes and medical literature, overcoming retrieval accuracy and imaging-dataset challenges through semantic chunking and metadata-driven indexing. Also has hands-on orchestration experience with Airflow and Azure Data Factory, plus a pragmatic approach to LLM evaluation and stakeholder-driven iteration.”

“Applied ML to physical EV fleet systems at ST Labs, building a real-time CNN-LSTM fault prediction pipeline from streaming vehicle telemetry and addressing live data alignment issues via resampling/interpolation and buffered inference. Also developed a V2G/G2V energy transfer algorithm to automate charging/discharging for profit optimization, and made high-impact low-latency pipeline decisions at Astera Holdings using profiling, replay testing, and live A/B validation.”

“Backend engineer who built and owned an AI-powered SMS survey platform for a nonprofit serving at-risk communities (internet-limited users), using Cloudflare Workers + Twilio and a state-machine survey engine. Scaled it to ~10k active users with near-zero downtime, added English/Spanish support, and iteratively improved LLM behavior (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) to handle nuanced, real-world SMS responses reliably.”

“Engineering leader/player-coach who helped ship a web-based ERP SaaS release (Nov 2025) as part of a long-term migration from a legacy desktop ERP, designing a multi-API architecture (Oracle + EF Core, caching, integrations) and enforcing rigorous code review quality gates. Previously led development of a low-latency, multi-service high-frequency trading platform at a startup hedge fund (Capitalogix Trading), leveraging async/multithreading, event-driven messaging, NoSQL, and WebSockets.”

“ML/AI engineer with production experience across retail and healthcare: built a real-time computer-vision shelf monitoring system at Walmart and optimized edge inference latency by ~30% using TensorRT/ONNX and pruning. Also partnered with CVS Health clinical/pharmacy teams to deliver a medication-adherence predictive model, using Streamlit explainability dashboards and achieving an 18% adherence improvement.”

“AI/software engineer with experience at Visa building a real-time transaction fraud/risk scoring microservice in the card authorization path (Python, Kafka, Kubernetes on AWS) with strict 120–150ms latency constraints and reason-code outputs for downstream decisioning. Owns ML backend end-to-end (data/feature engineering, model training, deployment) and has demonstrated production reliability work including latency spike mitigation, SLO-based observability, drift monitoring, and safe fallbacks to rule-based decisions.”

“AI/ML engineer who has shipped production AI systems end-to-end, including an automated multi-channel (Gmail/WhatsApp/voice) candidate interviewing workflow and an enterprise RAG knowledge search platform. Demonstrates strong production rigor (monitoring, A/B tests, guardrails, schema validation, shadow testing) with quantified impact: ~60–70% reduction in interview evaluation time and ~20–30% relevance gains in RAG retrieval.”

“Healthcare GenAI engineer who built a HIPAA-compliant, auditable RAG-based claims decision support system at Molina Healthcare, processing 3M claims and delivering major impact (48% faster manual reviews, 43% higher decision accuracy). Deep hands-on experience with LangChain orchestration, vector search (ChromaDB/FAISS), embedding fine-tuning, and safety controls (confidence scoring, rule validation, human-in-the-loop escalation) for clinical workflows.”

“Data engineer/platform builder with experience across PwC and Liberty Mutual delivering high-volume, production-grade pipelines and real-time data services. Has owned end-to-end streaming + batch architectures on AWS and Azure, including web scraping systems, with quantified reliability gains (99.9% availability, 90%+ error reduction, 30% latency reduction) and strong observability/CI-CD practices.”

“Unreal Engine UI engineer focused on scalable, production-ready UI architecture (C++/Slate/UMG/CommonUI) with strong designer enablement via decoupled, interface-driven patterns and MVVM. Demonstrated measurable performance wins: replaced 200+ per-frame Blueprint bindings to cut UI prepass/paint from 4.2ms to 0.5ms and reduced VRAM by ~120MB using texture streaming proxies.”

“ML/Backend engineer with ServiceNow experience building production-grade inference services on FastAPI with Docker/Kubernetes (autoscaling, health checks) and strong reliability practices (monitoring, retries/timeouts, fallbacks). Delivered measurable improvements including 30% lower API latency and 18% higher model accuracy, and built A/B testing plus drift-triggered retraining loops to keep models stable in production.”

Srinivas Matta

Screened

Mid-Level Full-Stack Software Developer specializing in cloud-native web platforms

Paducah, KY4y exp

“Software engineer at Capital One who owned and shipped AI-driven personalization and internal insights dashboards end-to-end, emphasizing fast iteration with feature flags and tight user feedback loops. Built a TypeScript/React + Spring Boot/Python document automation platform with compute-heavy NLP microservices, async workflows, and production-scale reliability/performance practices (Kafka/RabbitMQ-style queues, Redis caching, tracing).”