Vetted API Development Professionals

Nicholas Ogura

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive Platform & Security Engineering leader specializing in multi-cloud Kubernetes and FinTech

San Diego County, USA18y exp

“Startup-focused infrastructure/security leader who stepped into head of engineering and re-platformed an entire product end-to-end in 3 months to meet launch. In crypto/fintech, recognized the market-data system as an ETL/data product and rebuilt it as a separable, securely accessible platform—prompting inbound interest within a week—while advocating an open-source-first observability stack (Prometheus/Grafana/Loki) to avoid vendor lock-in.”

“Fintech product builder focused on AI-native opportunities; recently helped their company operationalize LLMs in customer service and bank ops by creating systems to continuously improve prompts and evaluations. Also drove growth by identifying hooks in a major American retailer distribution channel and integrating into the retailer’s payment flows to become a key part of the user funnel.”

Sahitya Thota

Screened

Staff/Tech Lead Software Engineer specializing in identity, data platforms, and cloud systems

Fremont, CA20y exp

“Engineering leader/player-coach who built and owned end-to-end sales-facing data products, including a 360° advertiser insights platform and a sales AI agent for natural-language access to insights. Demonstrated strong architecture and reliability chops (event-driven redesign to eliminate Hive-query throttling; batching/caching to reduce fan-out) plus incident ownership around ads attribution consistency. Also has 0→1 experience building graph-based recommendation/matching systems with explainability and tight user feedback loops.”

“Repeat startup co-founder with multiple successful exits and significant fundraising experience (most recent raise $6M USD; prior raise £10M GBP). Interested in roles bridging investors and startups—performing due diligence and evaluating MVPs/USPs to help firms invest in the right companies and support portfolio growth toward exit.”

“Backend/AI engineer currently at Stripe building Minions, an internal LLM-based developer agent that automates code generation, bug fixes, and PR creation. They combine strong production LLM architecture skills with reliability engineering, having improved routine PR merge times by ~40-45%, lowered post-merge bug rates by 12%, and previously built an invoice-processing pipeline that achieved 91% straight-through processing in a B2B payments context.”

“Backend engineer who helped redesign and refactor Forma’s backend during an app rewrite, emphasizing modularity, maintainability, and A/B testing support while delivering feature parity on a quarter-long timeline. Led a careful database migration using parallel databases with schema differences, validating integrity via staging and SQL checks, and has experience debugging subtle computer-vision overflow edge cases.”

“Serverless-focused backend/data engineer who has delivered production Python services on AWS (FastAPI on Lambda/API Gateway) plus Glue-based ETL pipelines from S3 to relational databases. Strong in operational reliability (timeouts, retries, monitoring/alerts) and modernization work, including parallel-run parity validation for migrating legacy batch logic to Python services. Demonstrated measurable SQL tuning impact (15 min to under 3 min).”

George Liu

Screened

Intern Software Engineer specializing in full-stack, backend, and AI agent systems

Fremont, CA1y exp

“Backend engineer with Tesla experience who redesigned vehicle registration into a step-based, region-configured workflow across 4–5 microservices, enabling partial saves and reducing customer drop-off. Has hands-on experience scaling and securing Python/FastAPI APIs (OAuth2/JWT, CORS), migrating cold data from MySQL to MongoDB via Kubernetes CronJobs, and implementing RBAC/RLS with Supabase + Postgres.”

“Serial entrepreneur who has created several companies, brought them to market, raised as much as $15M, and achieved exits before moving on to new ideas. Combines an academic and institutional background spanning Harvard, MIT, Mass General Brigham, and the Department of War with two decades of consulting experience, and is especially motivated by building impactful technology.”

“Frontend-leaning full-stack engineer who built an internal real-time operations dashboard from 0→1 using React, TypeScript, Redux Toolkit, Material UI, and Node.js integrations. Stands out for hands-on performance tuning at scale—profiling and fixing excessive re-renders, optimizing live-update UIs, and iterating post-launch with caching, pagination, and observability.”

“Backend/data engineer with healthcare/telehealth domain experience, building patient appointment and data-processing systems on AWS. Has delivered production microservices and ETL pipelines (Flask/Celery, Glue/PySpark) with strong reliability/observability practices (JWT, retries/timeouts, Sentry/CloudWatch) and modernization experience migrating SAS workflows to Python services, including a documented 10min→30sec SQL performance win.”