Vetted Apache Spark Professionals

Likitha Kukunarapu

Screened References

Mid-level Applied AI Engineer specializing in data engineering and healthcare AI

Remote, USA3y exp

“Built production LLM agents spanning document Q&A, financial insight generation, and ERP-like operational data workflows, with a strong focus on reliability, grounding, and evaluation. Stands out for translating LLM systems into measurable business outcomes, including 70%–80% support workload reduction and a fallback-rate improvement from 18% to 8% through targeted RAG iteration.”

“Built and productionized an internal GenAI chatbot that makes company policy/SOP knowledge instantly searchable, using a secure RAG architecture on AWS (Bedrock/Titan embeddings/OpenSearch Serverless, Textract/Lambda/S3 ingestion, Claude 3 Sonnet). Demonstrates strong MLOps/orchestration experience (Airflow, Step Functions with Lambda/Glue/SageMaker) and a rigorous reliability approach (RAGAS metrics, A/B testing, citation validation, monitoring), including collaboration with compliance stakeholders via review dashboards.”

“AI Software Engineer (student employee) at University of Washington IT who helped deploy "Purple," a governed, explainable LLM platform on Azure used by 100,000+ students/faculty/staff. Independently led scalable reliability efforts by building automated agent quality/load/red-team testing and CI/CD health validation (Playwright/Node.js, Azure DevOps), and previously built an explainable AI scheduling assistant for clinical operations at Proliance Surgeons.”

“Backend/platform engineer who has owned a real-time data ingestion/processing/reporting API built with FastAPI, Redis, and Celery, including performance tuning via query/index optimization, caching, and async workers. Strong Kubernetes + CI/CD + GitOps (ArgoCD) experience, plus hands-on monitoring/logging (Prometheus/Grafana/ELK) and a Kafka/Spark real-time streaming project from their master’s program.”

“Backend-leaning full-stack engineer who has built AI-powered analytics products from 0→1, including a predictive analytics dashboard and an AI orchestrator for natural-language-to-database querying. Particularly strong in making LLM systems production-safe through schema validation, self-healing retries, monitoring, and retrieval optimization, with quantified impact on cost, latency, and quality.”

“ML/AI engineer with hands-on ownership of production recommendation and GenAI systems, spanning experimentation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration. Stands out for delivering measurable outcomes—22% CTR lift, 15% conversion lift, and a 30% reduction in support tickets—while demonstrating strong judgment on latency, cost, and safety tradeoffs in real-world systems.”

Laxminarayana Yaga

Screened

Mid-level AI/ML Engineer specializing in Generative AI, RAG, and MLOps

Missouri, USA4y exp

“Built and deployed a production RAG pipeline at PNC Financial Services to let risk/compliance analysts query millions of internal financial documents in natural language, reducing manual search and speeding regulatory validation. Demonstrates deep practical experience with large-scale document ingestion/OCR cleanup, retrieval performance tuning (hierarchical indexing, caching), and LLM reliability controls (grounding, citations, abstention), plus cloud orchestration on Azure and AWS.”

“AI/LLM engineer with healthcare domain experience who built a production clinical support “chart bot” for Molina, including PHI-safe ingestion of 200k+ PDF policies, vector retrieval, and a fine-tuned LLaMA served via vLLM on ECS Fargate. Demonstrated measurable performance wins (HNSW + namespace partitioning; 30% inference latency reduction) and a rigorous evaluation/monitoring approach, while partnering closely with nurses and operations teams to shape workflows and guardrails.”

“Backend Python engineer focused on production-grade automation and reliability, with hands-on experience designing scalable API systems on PostgreSQL and making pragmatic architecture calls (modular monolith over premature microservices). Demonstrated measurable performance wins (50–60% latency reduction) and strong operational rigor via observability, incremental rollouts/feature flags, and security patterns like JWT + RBAC + database row-level security.”

“Infrastructure security/DevSecOps engineer who led security and automation patterns during a large Azure migration (30+ legacy apps, wave-based execution), enforcing zero-trust controls by baking CrowdStrike/Illumio into golden images and adding CI/CD security gates. Experienced integrating GitLab runners and Terraform agents as containerized services with strong secrets management (Azure Key Vault) and disciplined image/versioning practices, and has hands-on troubleshooting of ACI runtime constraints under load.”